


Discordance

by pocketfullofkouhuns



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Complete, Don't Have to Know Canon, F/M, Force-Sensitive Reader, I have no idea how to tag, Mandalorian, Mando'a, Post-Season/Series 02, References to Canon, Self-Insert, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Slow Romance, That's Not How The Force Works, The Force Ships It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-22
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:20:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 79,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26733493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocketfullofkouhuns/pseuds/pocketfullofkouhuns
Summary: You steal something from a dickwad and then have a whole weird journey over it. Your brain gets scrambled and you find yourself somewhere unexpected with some very secretive people.
Relationships: The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)/Reader, The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)/You
Comments: 65
Kudos: 281





	1. Tone

**Author's Note:**

> Baby’s first fanfic. I am not a Star Wars canon expert. I am making most of this up as I go along. Sometimes I gotta retcon stuff. You get what you pay for. I had plans for this to kind of meander indefinitely, but it hasn't really found much of an audience lately, so I'm thinking I'll lovingly wrap it up with Chapter 20 and move on to something else!
> 
> [Spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0bx5EuuTLO2m2soHIUjIqQ)

It was the Armorer’s fault, really.

She was the one who dropped you into Mando’s path.

The first time, you’d, uh, _liberated_ a couple cargo crates from some ex-Imp dickhead. The guy fancied himself a warlord and was trying to make a name for himself by siccing his goons on the townsfolk in your little corner of Nevarro. You turned a group of his easily-distracted Stormtroopers into Loth-cats chasing their own tails using a couple cheaply-made micro-charges you got playing sabacc with a Rodian.

Well, cheating at sabacc. Whichever.

Anyway, you made off with the cargo, pissed off some Imps, and cost their crew more than a little street cred when you got two of the bucket-headed bastards to crash their landspeeders right into each other. After that, you glided the goods into an ill-used alley, hopped off your speeder, and cracked the first crate open.

“Food or blasters, food or blasters,” you muttered under your breath like a prayer. You didn’t much care for blasters, personally, but with the right fence, they became food easily enough. Someone always wanted to buy a blaster. “Food or bl—asshole! What. An. Enormous. _Asshole!_ ”

A marble toilet. Half the families in this district couldn’t put enough food in their children’s bellies, and this fuckwad was renovating his fresher and installing a marble toilet. Unbelievable.

You resumed muttering, but with more of a threatening cadence than a hopeful one. Oh, you were gonna humble that pretentious prick, you resolved, prying the lid off the other crate. You were gonna tear that dude down and then drown him in his own old, un-remodeled toilet. Let him die with shit in his lungs, like he fuckin’ deserved.

With a thunk, you popped the lid off the other crate. You startled so hard you almost fell down, but you successfully stifled a yelp at seeing the four red eyes and countless teeth of a _motherfucking nexu_ staring back at you. Your hand flew to your chest and clutched at your tunic, grabbing a handful of fabric while you regained your bearings and were decidedly _not_ ripped into a thousand bloody scraps. A nexu would have killed you by now. It was… a hide? No, a rug. Confusion gave way to a renewed hatred. Who the fuck _was_ this guy? You felt a scowl curl its way across your face.

Something hummed down your core, and before you realized what you were doing, you released your grasp on your shirt, stretched your hand out, and plunged your fingers into the coarse fur of the nexu. You lifted a fold of the pelt aside and the strange feeling in the heart of you grew stronger. No… louder? It was almost a voice. A song. Except you couldn’t hear it, you could just _feel_ it.

It took you a moment for the song to crescendo and for you to finally realize what lay nestled beneath the nexu in the crate—what the true treasure inside was.

Beskar. Bars and bars of Mandalorian iron, arranged in careful stacks. You put your hands on the edge of the crate to hold yourself up. A memory drifted up through the mists of your past and surged through you like electricity.

_I’ll tell you a story, mayaveska. Come, sit. Be warm._

You felt pressing woe and rising gorge in equal measure, lodged in your chest so firmly you thought they might choke you from inside. You reached down into the crate and traced your fingertips along the edge of an ingot. You picked one up, cradling it in your palm and turning it over. When you saw the Imperial stamp cast into the corner, you curled your hand into a fist around the bar, your grip so forceful you felt the edges of the ingot bite into your skin.

_A great many fates have befallen our family by dint of our forebears, mayaveska—fates which now must fall to you._

A song awoke in your center and sang itself to a fever pitch. You felt confused, even alarmed, but you felt them from such a distance that they barely registered. The melody rang out above everything else and dulled your senses. It sang of devotion, and conquest, and battle, and zeal. Of shifting winds and turning tides and branching destinies. It sang, and it _pulled_.

Without really making the choice to do so, you packed your knapsack full to bursting with beskar and slipped the last two ingots into your back pockets. You hid the crates in your usual spot, tucked the ends of your headscarf into place, and walked. And walked.

You weren’t sure where you were going, but you felt the song, you felt it singing of home. Along unfamiliar alleys and through empty streets, you walked. Your path doubled back on itself more than once but you thought nothing of it. You just followed your feet.

You feet briefly led you up and down the same trash-filled, secluded-ass alley three times, but eventually you realized that you needed to look beyond the trash. Literally. Behind a stack of garbage was a loosened grate that led down into the sewer beneath the city.

You wandered around, agog at the vast network of tunnels that had been hidden in plain sight under your feet this whole time. You placed a hand on the flat of your chest and tuned in to the murmuring refrain, then closed your eyes and surrendered to the relentless forward march of your feet. You wound your way through turn after turn, trying to keep track at first, but giving up when you botched the mnemonic after the seventh fork in your path.

The song grew louder and more fervent as you took your turns, and your feet sped up as they ambled along the tunnels. You felt the air grow warmer and your footfalls more urgent. The song took on a character of rebirth and triumph and trust that brought tears to your eyes and blurred your vision as you stepped down two stairs and through a doorway.

Then all at once, with one final flourish, the song stopped.

The sudden silence in your head dropped you to your knees on the stone, the substantial weight in your pack clanging loudly against the backs of your thighs. You were exhausted, your reserves completely emptied. You keeled forward, catching yourself before you hit the ground. 

Such complete stillness was practically deafening after what must’ve been hours of wandering across the sandy face of Nevarro.

“Are you alright, child?” asked a clear, harmonic voice.

You settled back on your heels, opened your burning, heavy eyes and beheld a golden woman with tiny horns. She wielded a hammer and was silhouetted by blue flame. Fuck, were you dead? Was this a psychotic break? Did the metal poison you? You heard that could happen sometimes; impurities were absorbed through the skin. Just your luck. You were trying to give up the haul of a lifetime and it killed you anyway. Ah, well.

She approached you, bent down, and gently took your chin in her gloved hand. She turned your head left and right and you could feel the weight of her scrutiny, even through her inscrutable metal face. No, a helmet.

“A spicer?” came a similarly musical voice, this one a man’s.

“No,” replied the woman, setting down her divine hammer. She picked up a flask and brought it to your lips. When she tipped your head and the canteen back, the sweetest liquid you’d ever tasted slipped down your throat. You drank deeply and felt your fevered body cool from the inside.

“Where have you been, girl?” she said, the electronic purr of her voice buzzing around your dizzy head quite pleasantly. “You have been… touched by something not of Nevarro. Not of any corner of this galaxy.”

You reached up to touch her golden face, but couldn’t quite lift your arm enough. Instead, you pressed your fingers into the fur at her shoulder. It reminded you of something, but you couldn’t exactly say what. You patted the fur and purred back at the golden lady that you’d been all over, “walked alllllll over,” and you were gonna drown a terrible prick of a man in his gross old toilet, just like he deserved.

And then you passed out.


	2. Downbeat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You make new friends, and one of them is kind of a grumpy-puss.

_It is not for me to tell you in which of your forefathers’ footsteps you must follow, mayaveska—the choice must be yours alone. Two great paths lay behind you, and shall be mirrored ahead. Which you take will be for your heart to decide._

“Nexu cat!” you shouted, sitting bolt upright in the sand.

Movement blurred to your right, and it took a moment for your eyes to lazily focus on the blaster aimed at your head. You shifted your gaze to the helmeted figure wielding the weapon and held it there. If he was gonna shoot you, he was gonna look you in the eyes when he did it. You were too tired to fight him about it anyway. As you sat staring, an absolute _motherfucker_ of a headache caught up with you, your stomach lurched, and you felt yourself pale.

“You have forgotten your hospitality,” the golden woman admonished the man. “She is not well.”

She approached you with the flask again and bade you to drink. You gulped down a bellyful of the same sweet liquid she’d fed you before, which you realized was just ice-cold, very pure water. You hadn’t been this thirsty since you’d gone drinking with a bunch of hick-ass moisture farmers back in the day. Dust juice and bantha milk made for a hell of a cocktail, if you were into throwing up a lot. Those kids could drink _Coruscant_ under the table. You were desperately hungover for three days after that.

Things were too fuzzy for you to be alarmed by it, but you found a misty void where your short-term memory should be. You thought really hard about asking a whole lot of questions about your present circumstances and past activities, but you couldn’t come up with a burning enough question to warrant the massive effort it was going to take for you to open your mouth and speak, so you settled on silence. Instead of voicing it, you nodded your thanks to the golden woman. You traced your fingers around the edge of your headscarf to ensure it was in place and that your hair was covered. You reached behind your head and squeezed the bundle of hair and fabric there—a comforting tic you’d had as long as you could remember.

Your eyes focused on the fur around the woman’s shoulders, the beskar at her chest, and it all came rushing back. You looked around quickly, taking in your surroundings. A forge. She wasn’t a goddess and her hammer wasn’t divine; she was a blacksmith and her hammer was just… a hell of a hammer.

You scanned the room for your bag and found that it was where your head was a moment ago; you’d been resting on it. You pressed a hand to the fabric to make sure it still felt as solid as it should, and almost breathed an audible sigh of relief when you found that it was.

“You’re Mandalorian,” you finally spoke.  
  
They said nothing, which you couldn’t fault them for, since all you’d done was state the obvious like a dumbass.

“I’ve brought something for you,” you said. “I… found it, in a crate. That I stole. Some pretentious Imp had it all hidden away, like the rat bastard he is, but I found it, and it wanted to come here. To you. So I brought it down. I didn’t know there were even any people down here.”

You were babbling. You closed your eyes, took a breath, and heaved your bag into your lap. It took two tries and a strained grunt to settle it into the space between your folded legs. You undid the closure and lifted the flap, then motioned for her to take the knapsack from your lap or at least look inside.

She knelt on the ground opposite you, and peered into the bag with some trepidation. You couldn’t blame her, you knew you sounded totally unhinged. You were just too damn tired to get your words out right. They all fought to fall out at once. 

After a moment of silence, she leaned further over the bag for a second, then stuck her hands inside and pulled handfuls of metal from your bag. She went faster and faster, like she was looking for the bottom of the pack. Thirty-eight ingots in all.

She neatened up the stacks reverently, her fingers lingering over the Imperial stamp the same way yours had done earlier. You felt the beskar hum its pleasure, hum a song of home.

The Armorer raised her face to you and you heard her breathing through the modulator in her helmet. “I do not understand,” she said. “You say it ‘wanted’ to come to me.”

You summoned the effort to nod. “I know how it sounds,” you said. “But it—I don’t know, it was like it led me here. I had no idea this place even existed.”

“Few do,” the Armorer said. “It is how we survive.”

You nodded solemnly. You felt the Armorer and the other Mandalorian both regarding you.

“I’m sorry,” you said. “For how this was collected. For everything you’ve been through. I hope you feel that bringing it down here was the right thing to do, but I’m sorry if I’ve invaded your privacy. I won’t… I don’t even know where I am, so I can’t tell anyone you’re here. Not that I would.”

The Armorer looked down at the stacks of beskar between you. She pressed a hand to the top of a pile. You knew she was imagining the people— _her_ people—who were murdered and then had their holy armor melted down, only to be stashed away by some greedy, hatchet-faced little fuck just because he could.

You stretched out your hand to rest it on hers, but then realized you weren’t sure if those types of gestures were appreciated by Mandalorians. You laid your hand on a stack of beskar instead, your thumb caressing the smooth surface. You moved to turn it over, to hide the Imperial seal that marred its perfect surface, but she wrapped her gloved hand around yours before you could finish forming the gesture.

“It is good to remember the past,” she said. “Even if it is filled with horrors. Perhaps _especially_ if it is filled with horrors. This way, we may prevent their recurrence.”

You placed your hand over hers, taking her cue for propriety.

“I’m glad it’s home,” you said.

“As am I,” she said. “This is… quite an unexpected boon. I did not think I would ever see this much beskar at once.”

Her forge hissed, and she took to her feet slowly. She placed her hand on your shoulder and regarded you for a moment before turning to her work.

“Is it okay if I watch from here?” you asked. “Or should I go?”

“You may stay,” she said. “Provided he doesn’t mind.”

You turned to look at the man in his tattered, mismatched armor. You thought this might be not unlike a religious sacrament for him, and you didn’t want to intrude.

“I really don’t mind if you’d like me to g—“

“Stay,” he said.

You tipped your head to him once and turned back to the forge. The Armorer performed her duties with the precision of a surgeon and the soul of a dancer. It was moving in a way you couldn’t quite describe, seeing a brick of metal formed into something that might save its wearer’s life countless times over the years. She clearly undertook her task with reverence, and it added even more of a solemn air to the small, hot room.

The rush of the forge was the only sound in the workshop most of the time, punctuated occasionally with her expert hammering or soldering of components into place. You kept desperately hoping she would talk—something about her voice made you feel cloaked in safety. You found yourself pulled to the past, imagining yourself a child at her feet.

“Your pauldron,” the Armorer told the man, snapping you out of your reverie. She approached him and placed it over the blinking lights on his right shoulder. It came into place with a soft click. “Wear it well.”

He bowed almost imperceptibly.

“You are returning to your ship?” The Armorer asked her visitor.

“Yes.”

She turned back to her work. “You will escort this one back to the surface. Many in these tunnels would not show her due respect.”

The Mandalorian nodded once, turned on his heel, and left the tiny foundry. You hesitated, not sure if you were supposed to say goodbye to the Armorer, or if you were just dismissed now and expected to leave. You decided on the latter, and turned to follow him.

“I am in your debt,” the Armorer said. “Many will be. Beskar armor is often passed down through generations.”

You felt heat rush to your cheeks. “It’s no big deal,” you said. “It was your stuff, I just returned it.”

“It is an enormous ‘deal,’” she said. “Lives will be saved that would have been otherwise lost, and our kind has few lives to spare. I hope my…tribesman will share my gratitude.” She tipped her head to the doorway that he had just walked through.

“Uh, any time,” you said. The gravity of her voice made you want to linger, to ask one of the thousand questions zipping around your brain, but you could no longer hear the man’s footfalls in the tunnels and you didn’t want to waste your chance at an armed chaperone. You gestured to the door with a thumb and said, “I should…”

She nodded almost imperceptibly and returned to the forge.

As you rushed out of the workshop, you scanned left for your escort and didn’t see him, so you turned right out of the doorway and almost walked face-first into a solid body covered in cloth and rust-colored beskar. He was leaned up against the side of the tunnel with one foot resting flat against the wall, the very portrait of ease. You threw up your hands reflexively to avoid a collision, and then almost fell when you jerked your hands back in fear of touching someone who wasn’t expecting it. An arm as solid as stone snapped out to steady you, and you instinctively wrapped your own arm around it for balance, your hand curling around the beskar bracer over the wrist.

Warm. Weirdly warm. You would not have thought that steel would absorb that much body heat.

“Fuck. Sorry,” you blurted, ever eloquent in your surprise. After a beat, you added, “I didn’t mean to make you wait for me.”

You took a step back, shook out the phantom warmth in your arm, and straightened your hair scarf just to have something to do with your hands. You traced a finger along your cheek and under your ear to the back of your neck, tucking an imaginary stray bit of tassel while you waited for a response.

He held his gaze on you. At least, you _thought_ he was looking at you. The visor made it damn difficult to tell, but you felt the weight of it and it made you fidgety. Nothing made you fidgety. Ever. And yet, here you were.

It pissed you off. And being pissed off snapped you out of the sentimental mood you’d worn in the workshop and dropped you back in familiar territory.

“We gonna…?” you pointed down the tunnel.

The Mandalorian didn’t move. You got the impression he had something he wanted to say. Just as you were about to open your mouth to demand he fuckin’ spill it already, he pushed off the wall with his foot, heaving his shoulders and propelling himself into motion. He set off down the walkway, not bothering to see if you were following him.

Follow you did, though, not wanting to have to find your own way out of the maze of sewer now that your creepy singsong guide had stopped directing you.

He prowled those tunnels like a rancor, all muscle memory and pent-up fury. He never checked side paths for other people, never stopped to consider his route, never looked anywhere but dead ahead. When he turned, his whole body turned at once. Where his hips led, the rest of him followed. And so you followed right behind.

Left, right, right, straight. Fuck, did it take this long to get here? Was this guy just leading you in circles? Or drawing you into some isolated nook to kill you?

Finally, you decided to just relax into it, trusting that he would either take you where he said he would, or else you’d just have to stab him when he tried something. Wouldn’t be the first time, you thought, pressing your fingertips to the hilt of the vibroblade strapped to your thigh through the hole in your pants pocket. You absentmindedly ran your thumb along the small collection of tally marks there. Nothing you were proud of, exactly, but staying alive sure as shit wasn’t something you were sorry for.

Just as you faded into your own thoughts, he stopped abruptly and rounded on you, and quite without your permission, your arm withdrew the blade from your pocket and brought it to the Mandalorian’s throat. It took you a second to realize what happened, and that he held a blade to yours as well. You weren’t sure who drew first, but if anyone got twitchy, it wouldn’t much matter.

Every fiber in your body stood at the ready. If you had been trailing behind him any closer, you would have walked right into him before you could defend yourself. As it was, you were tensed half a breath apart, both refusing to shrink from the proximity. Your fingers curled around the weapon in your hand and you prepared to shift the weight on your hip to use it.

“Why?” he said through the modulator in his helmet.

You waited for clarification, but none came. Finally you glanced to either side of you, shook your head ever so slightly, and asked, “Why what?”

“Why would you—“ he hesitated with an uncomfortable, thoughtful hum in his throat that came out almost as a growl, then continued, “why would you give up a fortune like that? What did you gain?”

“Why would I keep something that belonged to someone else?”

“You’re a _thief_ ,” he said simply.

You started to say something and changed your mind about ten times in the span of five seconds, opening and closing your mouth every time you rearranged your thoughts. You looked like a fuckin’ half-witted burra fish, and you knew it. You clacked your teeth together and locked your jaw until you formulated a response a moment later.

“I’m a thief,” you agreed. “But I’m not an asshole.”

It was his turn to talk, for Maker’s sake. You weren’t gonna say anything else until he said something of substance fir—“I steal from the Imps and from fancy fucks who piss away money on frivolous shit while the rest of us starve. I don’t steal from people who need what they have,” you blurted in a rush.

Son of a _bitch_. Was it the helmet? Did he have some mind-control Sith-lord bullshit wired up in there? You brought your free hand up to your chest and clenched at your tunic. Your knife-wielding arm was getting tired from holding it so high at such an awkward angle. Fuck, he was tall. At least, compared to you. Though most were. _Let’s just get on with it, dude_ , you thought. _I know two dances: fight or follow._

“The Empire is dead,” he said.

You scoffed, releasing your grip on your shirt but not lowering your weapon. “You don’t believe that any more than I do. The _Emperor_ might have died, sure, but there was a million slimy, jackbooted fuckweasels eager to throw on his mass-murdering robes before they even got cold.

“‘The Emperor is dead,’” you recited after a breath, then raised your empty hand in a fist you hoped looked as sarcastic as it felt. “‘Long live the Emperor.’”

Then you dropped your fist into the tight space between your hips and his, and turned it into a gesture not fit to be used in the presence of children.

A small breath escaped the Mandalorian, amplified by the modulator in his helmet. Was that a laugh or a sneer? Felt like a sneer. Tough crowd.

“Listen, guy,” you said, dropping all attempt at humor or emotion from your voice and conveying the exhaustion you truly felt. “I got ahold of something that wasn’t mine, a bunch of weird shit happened, and I brought the beskar where it wanted to go. I gained _nothing_ , I lost out on probably fifty thousand credits—which,“ you gestured up and down your well-worn ensemble and finished, “sorely needed, by the way—and all I’ve gotten for it is a hangover and assache, which is fine, but I draw the line at having a _knife_ pulled on me.

“Now, I get it, you’re a badass, point taken. But either just fuckin’ stab me already or keep your word to her,” you pointed back down the tunnel in the direction of the foundry, “and get me out of here like you said you would. I’m getting sick of the suspense.”

A beat passed. Two. Three.

With a flourish and a blur, the Mandalorian spun his blade into its sheath, but didn’t step back. “Foundry’s over there,” he said, tilting his helmet almost exactly in the opposite direction of where you’d thought it was.

It was not the only time you would hold a knife to Mando’s throat.

You opened our mouth to respond, but he turned away from you and wordlessly resumed his rancor-esque sewer-stalking. You slipped your vibroblade back into your thigh sheath, then raised both fists, clenching them so hard they shook, and made a childish scowl at his back, sticking your tongue out for good measure.

“I’m your guide, not your governess,” he called. “I don’t babysit. Let’s go.”

_What was that guy’s problem?_

You followed along through more twists and turns, waiting for something to look familiar, but nothing did.

Something about the Mandalorian’s little outburst was stuck in your craw—well, more than having a knife to your neck would already be. You were turning the whole damned day over and over in your head as your footfalls hushed along the sandy stone walkways. What was it that was grabbing your brain? You found the beskar, and since you knew a bit about the Mandalorians and the shit they’ve been through, you—

Ah, _fuck_.

Realization dawned on you like a slap to the forehead and you felt sorrow, understanding, and _blind fucking fury_ swell up in you all at once and you stopped in your tracks.

“You thought I was trying to get all buddy-buddy with the Armorer,” you called up to your escort, “so I could _kill the rest of you_?”

“Until you showed me you had no idea of the layout of these tunnels, yes,” he said cooly, his back disappearing around a corner.

“You… Jawa-fucking…” you huffed as you hurried around the corner and stopped in your tracks again. “Cock.”

There were four fuckheads of varying species and sizes spread out along the width of the sewer tunnel, and at the point of their weapons was the Mandalorian.


	3. Refrain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You and your grumpy new friend kill people. Oops, did y’all just have a moment?

“Honey, aren’t you going to introduce me to your friends?” you asked, deadpan.

“No point,” he said, his hands frozen on either side of his hips. “They won’t need their names again after this.”

A growl that could be felt more than heard rumbled across the stone, and the one on the right, a blue-green Britarro, waved around a vibrospear less for functionality or precision than style. He practiced a lot in the mirror, you bet.

Listen, the whole thing was basically over before you could fully register that it had started.

A humanoid in red armor fired his blaster at the Mandalorian, hitting him square in the beskar chestplate. Dumb. May as well throw a teddy bear at him, for fucks sake. The Mandalorian drew his blaster and fired twice into Red Armor’s face. His head became an unpleasant red mist, and the rest of his body made a dull thud on the ground. One down, but clearly new here. You almost felt bad.

The Mandalorian made a quick gesture at his left hip and tossed a blaster your way. You grimaced a little at how it felt in your hand—you never much liked the damn things, preferring the intimacy of a blade. If you were going to take a life, it would be out of necessity; if a death was out of necessity, you were usually afforded proximity. It wasn’t that you _liked_ to be up close when an enemy died, you just couldn’t stand the idea of casually killing someone, and a blaster seemed like a gateway to that. Everyone had their rules, but you didn’t have much time to ruminate on your own at the moment unless you wanted to do it dead.

The third member of the Fuckface Gang, a Twi’lek, bared his sharpened teeth, crouched down clutching his staff to his chest, and launched himself at the Mandalorian with a grunt. He landed on his feet with his staff stretched out behind him, tip crackling with electricity, and he hurled it forward with all his might. The Mandalorian leaned back so far he almost fell over, attempting to dodge the blow. He missed the worst of the strike, but you heard enough of a clang and zap against his beskar to know he caught a decent chunk of it. He kept his feet, but he reeled a bit, and you thought it must be awfully echoey in there. You pivoted back on one foot and then pitched yourself forward and kicked the hissy green bastard in the chest.

Alarm bells went off in your brain and you flung your arm out and dropped to the ground on instinct, grabbing the back of the wobbling Mandalorian’s armor. You brought him down on top of you, pulling you both to the ground just as a vibroblade flew from a humanoid woman’s hand with a deadly hum, sailing into the gap between where your escort’s helmet and chestplate were just a moment ago. You fired the borrowed blaster as your companion fell, hitting her in the side, where her armor wasn’t protecting her. Two down, at least for now.

The Twi’lek was on the two of you again before you could fully regain your feet, all wild fury and recklessness. His staff of little use at close range, he drew a blaster from a holster on his thigh and brought it to the Mandalorian’s right shoulder as he fired. Your guide made no noise, and you were relieved that the round must’ve struck his brand-new pauldron. You wrapped your hand around his blaster, feinted pushing him away and used his own weight and the leverage at his wrist to yank the Twi’lek closer, then elbowed him hard in the face. His nose exploded with blood, and the Mandalorian used the moment’s confusion to press his blaster to the side of your assailant’s chest and pulled his trigger twice. Three down, this one directly on top of you. Gross. The healing baths weren’t gonna be able to fix that.

You both heaved your fallen foe to the side and finally regained your feet. Seeing his odds shift, the Britarro turned and fled. You sighed and moved to raise your blaster but the Mandalorian beat you to it, firing once into your would-be murderer’s back. He landed with a wimpy thump in a heap on the ground.

“What the fuck was _that_ all about?” you asked, swiping deep red Twi’lek blood off your skin and making your way to the humanoid you weren’t sure was dead. You were relieved and a little sad to find that she was.

“Competitors,” the Mandalorian replied simply, his back to you. He twisted and clicked the components of his bracers, either from habit or to check for damage.

“For what?” you asked, walking back toward him.

“A job.”

“Hey, pal,” you said in a huff, “I almost got shot-stabbed over your professional squabble, the least you can do is give me a reason.”

“Not ‘almost,’” he said, still facing away from you. He tapped his own upper left arm.

“What? Oh,” you breathed. There was a decent-sized blaster hole in your tunic and a spreading black splotch creeping down your arm. You felt your guts go cold and your head a little fuzzy and you absolutely _despised_ yourself for it. You clenched your fist and gritted your teeth and called forth the numbing balm of anger. And then came the babbling. “Balls. That motherfucker. I’m _glad_ I broke his nose before he died. Shouldn’t it hurt? Why doesn’t it hurt? I thought that whole ‘oh shit I got shot and didn’t notice’ thing was just holo-vid nonsense. Hey! Can’t you at least turn around and look at me when you tell me I got shot? How hard did that dude hit you? Did he knock the manners out of that bigass head?”

“Scarf.”

Your hands flew up to your head automatically and a searing pain caused you to let out a colorful string of words that had probably never been put in that order before in the history of the galaxy.

“Hey, good news,” you said hoarsely after a shuddering breath and a slow exhale. “It hurts now.”

Sure enough, your scarf had slipped and a hands-breadth of hair was showing. Had he seen it? Fuck. Stumbling from one cock-up to the next, that was your superpower. You did your best to rewrap it one-handed but kept losing your grip on the ends of the scarf. The constant muttering under your breath took on a more and more frustrated tone. Your arm was really starting to hurt now, and you just wanted this shit over with so you could get back home and lick your wounds. Your giant fucking blaster wound.

“Use my hand” he finally said through the modulator, his back still turned, right arm bent out to the side.

“I can do it,” you said through gritted teeth. “Done it a million times.”

“Not one-handed,” he said, extending his arm and flexing his fingers in a beckoning gesture. “Sooner it’s done, sooner you can slap a bacta bandage on it, sooner it stops screaming.”

You glared at the back of his helmet but acquiesced. You stepped closer, and he turned his body toward you and offered his right hand, but angled his head left and down.

You stared at his proffered hand and struggled to remember how to tie a scarf. Usually, muscle memory just took over and did most of the work for you. Using someone else’s muscle for it threw the memory out the window and you felt totally lost. But this had to be done, and staring at his hand wasn’t gonna get you anywhere.

Hand shaking a bit from adrenaline and pain, you wrapped your fingers around his forearm and poised it above your forehead. “I’ll get it in place and then when I say, put your hand down onto the, like, top of my hairline to hold the fabric down,” you said. You released his arm and he held it aloft in place, waiting for your cue. Once you wrestled something close to the middle of the scarf over the top of your head, you gave him an “Okay,” and he gently rested the heel of his palm against your forehead. Just as he flexed his fingers to pin the fabric to your crown, the scarf slipped down and he curled his fingers into your hair. You froze as the unfamiliar sensation thrummed down your neck, and then you wrenched away like you’d been zapped. The full-body jerk caused pain to flare in your left arm, and you hissed between your teeth. You felt the Mandalorian’s fingers grasp at you for half a heartbeat as you pulled back, and then he snapped away, too.

“Sorry,” you said immediately, smoothing down the hair that had snagged on his gloves and the tingling in your scalp, then fumbling with the material to try again. “I… dropped it.”

“Don’t apologize,” he said. “Ready?”

“Yeah,” you said, centering the scarf on your head again with your good hand. He stretched his arm back toward you and squeezed his hand into a fist before relaxing it into a curve. “Okay.”

He pressed his gloved hand to your skin and pinned the fabric beneath the pads of his fingers. Uncertainty and awkwardness and vulnerability buzzed in your chest as you reached your uninjured right arm behind your neck to grab the left side of the cloth and pull it up around to the top of your head.

“I’m going to just kind of wedge this part underneath your hand,” you said. He slid his palm toward your hairline, walked his fingertips back a bit and lifted them, careful to not release or shift the material he was already holding.

You tucked the free end up underneath so it was secure, then repeated the process with the length of scarf from the other side of your neck. You were sure it looked like shit, and you could feel loose tassel tickling your skin, but that was a problem for later.

“I’m done,” you said. “Thank you.”

The Mandalorian lifted his hand from your head and turned to face you. Even through the warmth of the scarf you could feel cool air trickle in as the heat from his hand dissipated.

You danced your fingers around the edge of your scarf, making sure no hair was showing, and trying to tuck stray bits of fabric up into the rest of the headcovering. With one arm out of commission, it was a bit of a challenge, and you strained at an awkward angle to try and cram a stubborn bit of cloth underneath the bundle at the nape of your neck with your thumb. You muttered a curse when you scraped yourself with your thumbnail, and you felt your cheeks grow pink and your eyes start to well with frustration at one too many things gone wrong. Why couldn’t you do this _one simple fucking thing that you’d done every single day as far back as you could remember?_ Why did everything have to be _so fucking hard_? Why were you _so fucking weak_ that a damn headscarf was about to make you cry in front of someone you just helped kill four people in twenty seconds?

Wordlessly, your escort stretched out his right hand and with the tip of the index finger of his glove, he grazed the side of your neck and firmly coaxed the textile home.

“All covered,” he said, then turned away.

Gooseflesh erupted down your left arm and leg, and you suppressed an urge to raise your left shoulder and rub it against your neck to blot out the sensation. Partially because to raise your left shoulder would hurt like all hell, but partially because physical contact was not frequent for you, and you found yourself feeling like a starving man who stumbled on a small delicacy in the desert. What could you do but try to relish it?

——————————————————————————

“I hope we can agree that I saved your ass back there,” you said, perched on a large chunk of stone with the corner of a bacta bandage between your teeth.

The Mandalorian grunted. As close to an agreement as you were gonna get, probably. He knelt next to you on the ground, his hands full of your tunic, tearing at the blaster hole to get better access to your wound.

“Good, good,” you said. “That’ll offset me kicking it later.”

“Oh?” he said, taking the bandage from your teeth and unwrapping it. He’d produced it a moment ago from one of his many pockets. When you’d asked if he had a flask in there somewhere, he’d just ignored you. Rude.

“Maybe. Though you did get your bell rung pretty good by that Twi’lek. That might be enough to hold me over for now,” you said. You waited a beat or two, nodded to your wounded arm and asked, “How about you? Are you hurt?”

“Nothing that can’t wait a while,” he answered. He grabbed your wounded arm firmly at the elbow with his left hand and positioned the bandage with his right. “Ready?”

You nodded, then took five quick, panting breaths in and out. You stilled yourself, and transferred all of your tension into your right arm, leaving your left arm relaxed. He squeezed the bandage into place with a grip like a rabid fucking Wookiee with fire for hands, then moved his hand from your elbow to double the white-hot pressure on the wound. You stared unblinking at the horizontal bar of his visor, feeling your hands and jaw shake and your heart pound, but refusing to cry out. Your vision started to darken and narrow, your face began to go numb. You pled with yourself not to pass out.

“Listen to me,” he said in his golden, humming voice. “Almost there. Five, four, three, two, one.”

He released the vise around your upper arm, and the change in sensation was dizzying. The relief was immediate, but an emptiness lingered behind as well. He shifted, steadying you at your shoulder, waiting to see how you would handle the first aid. You resolved not to pass out.

“Why did you turn away when my scarf came loose?” you finally gathered the courage to ask, since he had just tortured you and you felt some honesty was in order.

The Mandalorian knocked on his helmet lightly with a couple gauntleted knuckles. “Not a foreign concept for me.”

“You didn’t think my bleeding was more emergent than my, whatever, modesty?”

“You weren’t bleeding that much,” he said. “Just hurt. Pain can be endured; compromising who we are is deadly.”

You felt the weight of his gaze, and tamped down the urge to ease the tension by talking, by begging to know if he saw your hair— _really_ saw it—when your scarf slipped down. You knew he hadn’t, because he wasn’t acting any differently toward you, but you wanted to know for sure. You felt sick with the need to know.

“Thank you,” he added into the silence. “For… back there. And the beskar. The Armorer… She’s vital to our people—to our survival and our society. I felt protective and I acted… ungratefully. I apologize. You’ve proven yourself an ally. I’m in your debt.”

That was more words at once than he’d spoken cumulatively since you’d met him. Mando got a little chatty once someone saved his life, it would seem. As far as ice-breakers go, you supposed it wasn’t too bad.


	4. Cadence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You get back to your … uh … safehouse? Is “safe” a bit of an overstatement? The end of your first meeting.

You, on the other hand, did not require an ice-breaker to get chatty.

Especially not when your defenses were so decimated by exhaustion. You weren’t sure how long this whole expedition had taken, but it felt like it had been at least a day and a half since you’d slept, if you didn’t count your little foray into unconsciousness back at the forge. Your body was pleading for rest, just about shutting down around you, but your mind was going a parsec a minute.

“Hoo boy, I am gonna have to lay low for a while after this,” you said through a yawn. Your thought came together and a little bit of panic tried to rise in you but you were all out of adrenaline, so it just settled in around you as fact. “Maker, _I stole a king’s ransom worth of beskar from an Imp with a private army_. And I won’t even have enough credits to eat on while I wait for the heat to die down.”

You plodded along silently for all of five steps before you started to laugh. The Mandalorian turned his head slightly to look at you from the edge of his visor, probably thinking you’d lost your mind.

“I am so fucked,” you said through a chuckle. “This is almost as good as when I lost my however-many-great grandfather’s blade to that cheat-assing Ikkrukkian. Except all I lost then was the last shred of my family. And my dignity. This one might finally get me killed.

“‘ _Oh, you must heed the lessons of your forebear, mayaveska; you must seek your destiny—your destiny will make you white and pure as snow_ ,’” You said, looking down at your bloodstained clothes and wearing your mother’s warm, luxurious accent to rebuke yourself. “Shows what you know.”

Your voice grew softer as you prattled on to yourself, too far in your head to remember your companion. “Vezza’s kids are gonna go hungry too, shit. Promised Tenre a chocolate bar for her birthday. Can’t fuckin’ _believe_ the mess I tromped around in. Tracked it around, really smeared it in the floorboards. Thought I was _soooo_ clever, sticking it to an Imperial asshole, getting back at him for stomping all over the rest of us.” You sighed. “At least something good came of it. The beskar’s back where it belongs—he won’t be rubbing his dirty, cock-grubby hands all over it. That’s something. Glad I did one decent thing on this rock. I—“

For like the fifth time today, you almost walked directly into the Mandalorian, who you failed to notice had stopped and pivoted toward you. This time he reached out with both hands before you could collide, touching one glove to your right shoulder and the other to the flat of your chest, avoiding contact with your injured arm. You stopped and looked up into his visor and found yourself finally silent and still.

He dropped his hands and stood almost toe-to-toe with you. The faint scrape of his glove as he rubbed it absentmindedly against his left bracer was the only sound in the tunnels. You didn’t take him for much of a fidgeter.

“These stairs go up to the bazaar,” he said.

“Oh, okay,” you said, picking at your sleeve. “Well, thanks for guiding me out, and you’re welcome for saving your ass. I… am going to go scream into a pillow about my choices for a while. See you around.”

He stepped in your path as you moved to the stairwell and held his hand up again.

“It’s late,” he said. “I should make sure you get home safe. In case the Imp’s guys are on the prowl.”

You waved his obligation away with your good hand. “It’s fine, I don’t live far from the bazaar.”

“You can lead, or you can follow,” he said, the soft buzz of the modulator smoothing the edge off his voice. “But I’m taking you home either way.”

You dropped your eyes to the base of his helmet and nodded. You sighed to yourself. You didn’t actually live that close, you were just trying to free the both of you from this awkward-ass situation. A pit of dread over your situation was opening in your chest and you weren’t really up to company anymore.

He led the way up the staircase and out onto the sandy surface of Nevarro. The sky was inky black and the streets were silent—he was right, it _was_ late.

You tipped your head quickly to the right to tell the Mandalorian which way to go. He walked half a step ahead of you, and you noticed him turn his head ever so slightly from time to time. Unlike in the tunnels, he was checking side paths up here on the surface.

The two of you wound your way through the almost-deserted paths for twenty minutes or so and were nearing your quarters when he turned to you and said, “You live ‘near the bazaar,’ huh?”

Your lips quirked in half a smile and you felt a little heat rise in your cheeks. “I said ‘not far from,’ and ‘far’ is pretty subjective, don’t you think?”

A few steps passed in silence and you added, “I didn’t want you to feel like you needed to keep babysitting me. I’m pretty independent, I can handle myself. Been doing it since I was 9.”

“Fine line between independence and pride,” he warned after a moment’s quiet.

If you could have rolled your eyes out loud, you would have, but you had to settle for a soft scoff instead. Dude just met you a few hours ago and thinks he’s got some deep-ass insight into the core of you.

Like you didn’t already _know_ your pride was going to kill you someday.

“This is me,” you said, gesturing to your door. You produced a keycard from your pocket.

“Wait.” The Mandalorian grabbed your arm just before you could swipe the card and open the door. You opened your mouth to ask him what his deal was, but he brought a finger from his other hand to the base of the T in his visor. You guessed that’s where his lips were, but without being able to see lips, the _shh_ gesture just looked silly.

You had to tamp down a curious thought about whether that was a common sign for “ _hush_ ” among Mandalorians, too, or if he’d used it for your benefit. Made a mental note to ask someone eventually. Assuming you weren’t about to die.

You threw your one good hand out as he released the wrist, cocked your eyebrow, and shook your head slightly in the universal gesture of “ _What the fuck is it?”_

He fiddled with some buttons on his bracer and started looking around at shit you definitely didn’t see. The way he was focused on your keypad, you were wondering if maybe he thought it had been tampered with. He tapped at his wrist a couple more times and your door slid open. The blood in your veins turned to ice-water.

He passed you a blaster from his hip again, same as in the tunnels, and pulled his own. He flicked the end of his blaster to the right side of the room, and you slipped in the door and trained your blaster in that direction.

It was _pitch-goddamn-black_ in there, and even though you knew the layout of the room well enough not to bump into stuff, you still couldn’t so much as see your hand in front of your face. You weren’t sure how you were supposed to clear a room like this.

But the Mandalorian could see in the dark because _of fucking course he could_ , and you stood at the ready as you watched the glowing orange light at his wrist bob around your quarters. Not very stealthy, you thought.

Just as the thought entered your mind, blaster fire lit up the room in a series of blinding flashes. Sparks flew off your companion’s beskar chestplate and a return burst answered back across the room. A groan and a thud a few feet in front of you were followed by silence. You heard footsteps grow closer, saw the bobbing orange light approach, and just as you started to breathe again, another shot rang out. In the nanoseconds of illumination, you saw the Mandalorian standing over a heap on the ground. Mandalorians didn’t take prisoners unless they were hired to, apparently.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

“No,” you said, moving slowly toward his voice, which was near a light switch. You clicked it on and the room came into dim, yellow-tinged focus. You put the borrowed blaster on the table next to you. “Are you?”

“No. Got me in the b—“

You reached out on instinct with your bad arm, making contact with the Mandalorian’s sternum, and shoved as hard as you could. A blaster round buzzed into the breath’s width between your faces. In the same heartbeat, your good arm flew out and loosed your blade. The sickening crack of plastoid armor surrendering to a vibroblade rang out through the small space, and a white heap fell to the ground at the end of your hallway.

“I— uh…” you began eloquently. “Huh.”

The Mandalorian was gathering himself up off your floor. You reached out with your good arm and offered him a hand up. Once he regained his feet, you pivoted and grabbed the blaster from the table. You moved down the hall, stepping over the motionless jumble of Stormtrooper armor on the floor, then turned to the fresher door, and kicked it in. You cleared the room, then turned your attention to your bedroom, the only other doorway in the small apartment. The door was slightly ajar already, and you took a breath to hope your home had already spent all its surprises.

You busted in the door and squinted into the darkness, looking for movement. When you didn’t see any, you bumped the light switch with your elbow and looked around. Didn’t take much looking to clear the room, though, because it was _totally fucking trashed_. They had tossed the place—overturned your furniture, dumped out your drawers, the whole deluxe package. Some dickhead had even taken a knife to your pillow.

“Mother. Fucker.”

Your ears were ringing from close-range blaster fire and anger, so you felt more than heard the Mandalorian approach from behind you.

“Who _are_ you?” he asked.

“Oh, don’t be dramatic,” you said, handing the Mandalorian his blaster, then turning back toward the fresher to root around for painkillers. Your arm was absolutely howling after that shove. “Mandalorians are supposed to be so cool and unimpressed.”

Your medicine cabinet had suffered a similar fate to your dresser drawers; its contents were spilled all over the floor. You mumbled blasphemies under your breath as you searched through the chaos for something to bring you even the slightest relief. You settled on a remedy and dropped twice the recommended dosage into your mouth and swallowed hard.

“I mean it,” he said. He reached out and grabbed your good arm, using the leverage to pull you up and spin you around in one fluid motion. “Who are you?”

“ _I’m no one._ I’m the girl who just had two ex-Stormtroopers lying in wait to kill her when she came home,” you said. “I’m the girl whose house is trashed, but, hey, cleaning it up will give her something to do to distract her from starving while she hides out—that is, something _other_ than waiting for more Stormtroopers to turn up. I’m the girl who’s gotta find a way to sneak two dead fucking bodies out of my house with one good arm. Speaking of, I’m the girl with a hole in her arm who can’t think through the pain, and I’m the girl who’s not up for answering questions. Leave me alone to be killed in peace.”

You crouched down to grab your blade out of the chest of the body on the floor in the hall. You wiped the blade on your pant leg—what was a little more blood at this point?—and re-sheathed it at your thigh.

“Please,” you said, barely a whisper, as you rested your forehead against the wall. Tears prickled at your eyes, a manifestation of exhaustion, fear, sorrow, and a hundred other things. You weren’t sure if your spirit, your legs, or your heart was going to give out first.

“Okay. Fine. No more questions,” he said. “For now.”

He stepped toward the body that had succumbed to blaster fire, crouched down, and said, “You can’t stay here. More will come.”

“This is all I have,” you said into the wall. “There’s nowhere else. I’m not leaving.”

The Mandalorian sighed through his helmet. He rose to his feet and moved to stand beside you. After a few breaths of silence, he walked to your overturned sofa and righted it. A bit more pacing around, footsteps padding back and forth, but you were so tired that raising your head and having to bear your full body weight without the help of the wall sounded impossible. Your whole body ached with exhaustion that made your muscles painfully restless but unwilling to move.

A moment later, you were aware of him standing at your shoulder again. “Here,” he said simply. He put one hand on your elbow and pressed the other to your upper back, guiding you to your uprighted sofa. “Rest.”

He pulled a bundle from his shoulder and offered it to you. A blanket you’d just seen on your bedroom floor, now neatly folded. You looked pointedly at the bodies on your floor.

“I’ll take care of it,” he said, pushing the cloth into your hands. “I can lock the door from the keypad outside when I go.”

You opened your mouth to argue, but found that it allowed your chin to wobble. Instead, you let your knees finally buckle, and you plopped down onto the small, lumpy sofa. It was divine. You collapsed sideways onto the cushions, covered yourself with the blanket, and, with a monumental effort and use of only one arm, turned to face the back.

Once your muscles relaxed into the cheap upholstery, your guard crumbled, and your shoulders started to shake with silent sobs. While the sound of the Mandalorian’s work rose up around you, you wept.

You wept like a lost child—because you were.

You wept like the world was ending—because it was.

You wept like the desperate and the damned.

And somewhere along the way, exhaustion overcame you, and you slept. You slept and slept, and for the first time you could remember, you didn’t dream.

———————————————————-

When you woke, you had about forty seconds of blissful amnesia before your stomach dropped and you remembered everything that had happened the day before.

You sat up gingerly on the edge of your couch and wished idly for death. You were surprised to find that your left arm didn’t hurt nearly as much as it had just a few hours ago, but your whole body was sore nonetheless.

Finding yourself alone at last, you undid the scarf around your hair—it had mostly fallen off in your sleep anyway—and let it cascade down around your shoulders. You shook it out and the aching tingle in your scalp was almost painful. You ran your fingers through the strands over and over again until the sore feeling faded, like poking at a bruise.

Looking around, you took survey of the damage from last night. Your, uh, houseguests were gone, with no visible sign they’d been there at all. The furniture was righted, and the worst of the chaos had been calmed. There were still piles of your stuff scattered all over the place, but it was much better than it had been. You were horrified at the thought of some stranger basically cleaning your house for you. Especially when you and that stranger had killed, like, six people together the day before. The gesture brought tears to your eyes all over again, and a mixture of despondency and gratitude filled your chest.

Looking around, your gaze settled on a box on your table. You rose slowly and crossed the room to stand in front of it, your muscles heavy with sleep and exhaustion and the previous day’s effort.

You took the lid off of the box and found a modest assortment of provisions—basic rations, mostly; enough of them to get by on for a couple weeks if you were smart and didn’t boredom-eat too much. Even counting Vezza and her younglings in the mix. Your heart lightened to see a couple especially kid-friendly options in there. Nestled in at the top were two chocolate bars, around which someone had tied a note. You slipped off the fabric and unfolded the small slip of paper.

On it was an address, written in a neat, unadorned hand. Beneath the address was written, _There’s a fine line between independence and pride. Walk it wisely._


	5. Prelude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You’re safe, but you’re getting a little stir-crazy. You aim a blaster at a friend and end up with a job offer.

The second time you and Mando crossed paths, you pulled a blaster on him, which was decidedly _not_ the Armorer’s fault.

You’d gathered up some stuff, taken a few things out of the box of provisions—including, you were ashamed to admit, one of the chocolate bars; after all, you’d only promised Tenre _one_ chocolate bar for her seventh birthday, not two!—and dropped the rest at Vezza’s in an elaborate ding-dong ditch around dawn. You couldn’t bear to tell her what was going on, and you didn’t want to linger long enough to risk someone seeing you. You’d left a note of your own inside the box, telling her you would be back. Then you’d slipped out of your quarters for good and taken a triply-circular path to the address the Mandalorian had left you. You’d taken such a roundabout way to avoid being followed that you almost certainly couldn’t’ve retraced it with a blaster to your head.

You’d stood before the door, not sure what to expect, and then entered the key code that had been neatly inscribed onto the note.

8-5-7-8-5-0-6

The door slid open with a hush, and before you lay…an incredibly…average…room.

Huh.

It wasn’t fancy, it wasn’t barren, it was just…a room.

You weren’t sure what you had been expecting, but Perfectly Normal wasn’t it, somehow. You hummed a thoughtful noise, then stepped through the doorway and took in your surroundings.

The door slid closed behind you, then you set your bag on the table and wandered around. There was absolutely nothing anywhere in the whole cluster of rooms that provided even the smallest personal detail about your host. You knew he wouldn’t be there—he certainly did not seem the type for guests or sleepovers or, like… _friends_ —but you’d thought maybe there would be something in here somewhere that might’ve given you even a tiny hint as to who you were dealing with.

You rifled through drawers, peeked in the space behind the mirror over the fresher sink, opened every kitchen cabinet. Nothing. For all you could tell, this was a rent-a-room or he’d managed to guess at some stranger’s keycode. Maybe he felt really bad for you and rented this room for you without ever using it for himself. Maybe this was _his_ “shit’s got real and I need to lay low for a while” crash pad. Or maybe he just did not put any indications of himself anywhere in the places he stayed, ever. They all seemed equally plausible, so you resolved to just stop thinking about it.

But it wasn’t like you had anything else to do. At all.

So you spun stories. Some you spun awake, but most you spun asleep, too bored to keep conscious.

In one, you and he took back Nevarro by taking on the Imp wannabe-warlord. You and the Mandalorian bashed in heads, redistributed food and water, and—quite inexplicably—spent a weirdly-long amount of time scratching a pot-bellied puppy behind the ears. Not a bad dream, all in all.

In another, he helped you fight your way back home, and then revealed himself to be a member of your grandfather’s watchmen. You woke from that one screaming and not sure why.

In yet another, you wandered a forest planet and stumbled across a tiny creature whose body was covered in fur, but who wore a Mandalorian helm. It drew a blade on you and warned you in a familiar, modulated voice that “compromising who we are is deadly” and reached out his little paw to snatch the scarf from your hair.

And then your cruel mind told you a story starring your mother. You dreamt of her hair, specifically, and her voice. You were so small, curled up crying in her lap after an injury—some playground row, most likely—and she leaned down to kiss your aching temple and gently wipe blood from your nose. The sheer golden curtain of her hair danced across your face, and the smell of it was a familiar mix of incense and tree blossoms that made your nose tingle. _My little beastling, you must learn control. Waters of rage run deep, and they will drown you._ The dream cut to another scene, and you found yourself a few years older, kneeling on a freezing shore, sobbing from the very bottom of your soul, screaming into the wind, daring the water to rise up and take you if it dared. An enormous wave rose up before you and you awoke with a start just before it crashed the shore, tears on your face and the smell of the sea on the back of your tongue.

You suddenly found yourself fed up of telling tales. And, just to be safe, you found yourself fed up of sleeping, too.

So you sat around and fought sleep as long as you could for days on end. You got good at flinging playing cards into a box, you taught yourself some holo-vid blaster-spinning tricks, you made an improvised dish with instant noodles that turned out to be inedible if not outright toxic, you practiced more and more elaborate ways of tying up your hair, and you talked to yourself. A bunch. Distracted you from the periodic noise of shouts and blaster fire outside. Great neighborhood.

You were deep in a pity hole one night, loudly voicing every self-deprecating thought that entered your head as you paced the rooms, spinning your blaster and trying to trick yourself into not feeling tired. Once that stopped working, you decided to take your conversation to the shower.

Who could have imagined that a hot shower would make you even more tired. You stood under the jets with your eyes closed, finding yourself out of things to chastise yourself for. Your mind emptied, and you lost yourself in the indulgent, almost painful sensation of the blazing-hot water cascading across your skin. As the water began to cool, you emerged from your daze and found yourself singing. It was one of the songs your mother often sang to you—you never learned what the words were or what it meant, you just sang it phonetically.

A swell of emotion rose up in you, and you turned off the tepid water, then stood clutching the towel to you. You finished the song, trying to grab at every one of what felt like hundreds of threads of memory dancing around you, but you failed to trace any of them back to the full tapestry. As the last note echoed in the room around you, the threads all dissipated, and you were left standing cold and alone.

You tried searching your mind for how the melody started, thinking maybe you could recreate the spell, but you came up empty. It was as if the tune flew out of your mind with the breath it took to sound out the final note.

Resigned and a little deflated, you dried off, dressed, and wound a towel around your dripping hair and tucked the tail firmly in place. You collected your discarded clothes and your other belongings, then opened the door and walked back to the main living quarters.

“Couple of questions,” a voice said.

You dropped the bundle you were holding and trained your blaster on the source of the voice. A figure stood before you in shining, unblemished beskar armor. A Mandalorian, but not _your_ Mandalorian, who wore beat-to-shit beskar painted rust red. 

“Easy,” he said, raising his hands to show they were empty. “It’s me. I knocked before I punched in the door code. When you didn’t answer, I figured pride got the better of you and you weren’t here.”

You relaxed, recognizing the modulated pitch of his voice and its distinctive cadence. You lowered the blaster and gestured up and down with it, pointing at his armor. “The getup’s gonna make it hard to keep a low profile.”

“You have no idea,” he said. He turned his back to you to sit at the small table. He raised an arm and waved you over with one fanning motion of his hand. “Here. There’s food.”

You walked over, turned up the brightness on the single overhead light, and set your blaster—well, _his_ blaster; he’d left it next to the box of supplies that morning—on the table, then sat down in the other chair. You grabbed up a skewer of meat and jammed a whole piece in your mouth. It had been days since you’d had anything remotely resembling fresh food, and you groaned your pleasure involuntarily.

After you’d swallowed your bite, you gestured to the rest and said, “Aren’t you going to eat? Do you need me to go in the other room?”

He shook his head. “I ate while I was waiting for you.”

“Oh,” you said. This room knew your secret identity _and_ his, apparently. “Well, thanks for sharing.”

“Consider it payment in advance,” he said as you shoved another piece of meat in your mouth.

You furrowed your brow at him as you chewed. “Hmm?”

“Two things,” he said. “One—I’ve got a job for you, unless you’re enjoying yourself here.”

You held up a finger, then swallowed hard. “Whatever it is, I’ll do it,” you said. “I don’t care if it’s professional carbonite-tester, wet-nurse to a nest of womp rats, personal helmet-shiner, whatever. I will do it. ‘Stir crazy’ isn’t even the half of it.”

A soft noise came from the Mandalorian’s helmet. That one was definitely a laugh, you thought. “Nothing quite as exciting as all that,” he said. “I could use some help on my ship.”

“Mmm,” you said around another bite. “I’m not a very good pilot, to be honest. Much as I want to be literally anywhere that isn’t this room.”

“Don’t need a pilot and I take care of my own armor,” he said. “Just some help with the other stuff. Basic maintenance, keeping things on hand, dealing with docking permissions, stuff like that.”

“Sounds like you need a droid,” you said.

“Don’t care for droids.”

“I guess I can be your droid, then,” you shrugged, chewing another mouthful.

“Good. Second thing,” he said. “Who the hell _are_ you, and why were you just singing a Mandalorian lullaby?”


	6. Concerto

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Damn, "safehouse" really WAS a stretch. Who likes concussions?

“I don’t _speak_ Mando’a,” you said.

“You can’t speak it, but you can _sing_ it?” You could practically hear his raised brow.

“I wasn’t singing it either! I was just humming a song.”

“Bullshit,” he said with a wave of his hand, a statement rather than an allegation. “We’ll come back to that, I guess. Something easy, then: what’s your name?”

“What’s _yours_?” you volleyed back.

He hung his head, groaned through the modulator, and banged a flattened hand onto the table, albeit softly.

A few moments passed in taut silence as you both racked your brains for what to say next. You weren’t _trying_ to be difficult, but you barely knew the dude, and you weren’t gonna just tip the few cards you held. You weren’t lying—you _didn’t_ speak Mando’a, you _didn’t_ know how to sing any Mandalorian songs, and as for your name… your mother had told you to keep it a secret all your days. Made you promise.

_You must become a light in the darkness, mayaveska, or else become a darkness in the light. I regret that I must teach you kindness and deceit in the same breath, to move you from a community into solitude, but more is at stake than I can say._

He reached out with his right hand and grabbed your wrist while his left hand slapped the switch on the wall. The room went black. You shouted wordlessly and tried to yank your arm back but his grip was like a vise. You heard a thud on the table and your blood ran cold with visions of him grabbing a weapon to torture you for information. You started to stammer, grasping for some word that would make him be reasonable. What could you tell him that would be true enough to appease him without putting you in jeopardy? Your mind raced and your breath came in a shuddering gasp.

You didn’t know what you expected the Mandalorian to do next, but it sure as shit wasn’t to start singing.

A warm, clear baritone settled down around you and you froze. His voice lacked its usual electronic quality, and it dawned on you that the sound a moment ago was him setting his helmet on the table. The melody was simple and chantlike, and it pulled at you in a way you couldn’t describe. You focused in on his voice—made easier by the dark, but you closed your eyes anyway—and listened to each note and sound. You found yourself tapping out an accompanying rhythm on the tabletop, your fingertips offering a countermelody to his voice. His grip on your wrist eased, and he drummed out the same beat on your forearm with two fingers.

You felt yourself pulled to lean forward slightly, and pushed your free hand across the tabletop as you did, bowing a breath closer to the voice in front of you. Your fingertips brushed the still-warm metal of his helmet resting on the table, and you transferred your cadence from the wooden surface to the beskar. The sound of the beat on the armor felt _right_ , whatever that meant.

Something in your chest swelled and soared, and you felt tears sting your eyes and your nose. Something stirred just below the surface of your consciousness, but you couldn’t quite make it out. Another thread you couldn’t grasp.

And then it grasped _you_.

A handful of feelings and sensations and images flashed through your mind at once, too fast for you to really inspect them individually. A small force of armored warriors making camp on high ground. Warm gusts of woodsmoke-scented air on your face from the campfire. Just visible at the horizon, a larger army lying in wait. A murmuring din of voices in prayer. The beginning of a battle as dawn broke through the treeline. An explosion casting an instant night and decimating the larger army. The smell of pyroclastic ash burning the back of your throat. The victors alight with divine favor. The sounds of celebration and the taste of beer as generations on generations of warriors shared the tale.

It ended as quick as it began, and you found yourself back in the dark, your voice in harmony with the Mandalorian’s as you both sang. You gasped and brought both your hands to cover your mouth, slipping from your companion’s grasp. He stopped singing, then after a moment you heard a faint scrape followed by the light switching back on. You cringed away from the sudden brightness, and when your eyes adjusted to the light, there was the Mandalorian, regarding you through his visor with his arms crossed over his armored chest.

“Ah, hell,” you opened your mouth to say, but at that very moment, you heard a beeping from the keypad outside. You and the Mandalorian both snapped up your blasters and aimed them at the door just as you heard a crash from your sleeping quarters.

Your eyes locked on the Mandalorian’s visor and he jerked his head quickly toward the crashing sound. You turned and hurried down the short hall, glad for the quietness of your bare feet on the stone floor. You pressed your shoulders against the wall on the far side of the doorway and strained your ears to listen.

Whoever was in there definitely was _not_ barefoot and quiet, presumably because they knew they had you _fucking cornered_ and didn’t feel particularly compelled to sneak.

You heard the front door whoosh open, then a few rounds of blaster fire, and a thump. You’d worry about that later. For now, the bedroom door was opening.

The breaking-and-entering idiot was holding their weapon straight in front of them. They stuck their blaster through the doorway with arms extended to steady and aim it. Rookie mistake. Must’ve been wearing Stormtrooper armor that wasn’t theirs, because not sticking your blaster three feet through an open doorway is, like, Using A Blaster Against Others 101. Definitely would’ve covered that at the, whatever, Fascist Buckethead Academy.

You showed them why it was a no-no. You grabbed the blaster and twisted it hard toward you, away from the Trooper’s aiming hand, then raised your own blaster and fired a round into their unarmored flank. They fell to the ground with a groan and you caught a hint of movement behind them.

Everything went bright blue and your nerves combusted into electric fire, and then the world switched off.

———————————————————

The adults were perfectly nice to you, but the other kids in the village called you “outsider” and no one would let you play Forest Spirits with them.

Once Mama was gone, you ran from there and never looked back. You became a true forest spirit, letting the trees shelter and feed and hide you. Months drifted by without you uttering a single word, and before long you were sleepwalking through the same routine every day. Climbing down from your perch at sunrise, padding silently through the fallen pine needles, drinking your fill in the creek and then making your way to the shore to collect anything edible that was unfortunate enough to find itself in a tide pool. You wandered every corner of the wilds that held a memory of her, a daily ritual that brought you only the barest of comfort, and then you would climb back into your nest in the trees and sometimes curl up into yourself and cry until sleep took you.

Winter was never far away there, and when the nights grew colder and colder, urgency built itself up in you like a fire. 

It was time to go.

You carried out your routine one last time, this time saying goodbye to every spot that reflected even a _hint_ of your mother’s essence back to you. Bade farewell to the orchards you’d strolled together, her tucking fallen blossoms into your hair or lifting you up to pluck fruit from the branches. To the edge of the village that sheltered you, its smells of incense and baking bread and its sounds of playing children and livestock. To the shore where you’d splashed and basked, a refuge you sought together when the village felt stifling—the shore that you fled to on the day you lost her forever.

You packed your meager handful of belongings—mementos of your mother, mostly, and some credits you hadn’t had much use for lately—along with a few supplies you’d collected on your last day. With fear and uncertainty wrapped around your heart like a fist, you slung your pack onto your shoulder and set off toward the small spaceport a couple hours’ walk from your forest.

When you arrived, you set about doing what children do best—going unnoticed while adults talked amongst themselves. Having spent so much time around the elders in the village, you had a good grasp of what would get you noticed and what would let you fly under the radar. So you weaved among clusters of grown-ups as they drifted between market stalls in the bright afternoon sun and made gentlemen’s agreements. You didn’t really have a specific idea of what you were listening for, but you knew it when you heard it.

“Don’t need 300 rations, Arzik, I need 15,” a human woman said to a merchant. Her voice was clear and determined, but lacking any aggression. “I’m only feeding myself, not an army. Just need enough to hold me over ’til I can get parts to fix the ‘sizer at my next stop.”

You stayed close by as she finished up her business, listening for signs of dishonesty in her interactions with other merchants—you’d gotten good at picking up when grown-ups were lying—and followed her from a distance, her short stature made her hard to track but the curly mop of hair and her droid were easy to spot in the crowd. You perused the merchants’ wares, occasionally buying something “for my mother” from the stalls to look nonchalant, even though the words cut you like a knife every time you said them. Keeping a few booths away from her as she did her trading, you bided your time until she returned to her ship to empty her full arms. The craft was surprisingly big for a crew of one. You waited and hoped you’d get your chance. When she and her droid emerged from the ship a few moments later and headed back toward the market, you waited until they rounded the corner out of sight and then snuck aboard.

The ship was an old thing, full of narrow hallways and low bulkheads. Mechanical sounds followed you down the corridors as you searched the small rooms for a place to hide. Each new noise made your heart race, and you would frantically strain your ears for the source. You weren’t sure if there were any other droids on board, and you didn’t want to find out.

You peeked through yet another doorway and found a room full of pipes and gauges and stale, warm air. No one would have much cause to come in here, you figured, and there were quite a few places to hide out of sight if they did. You closed the door behind yourself quietly and crept into a hidden corner. You cradled your bag against your chest, feeling it press your necklace into your chest, then curled up so very, very small, and waited.

It was a mere handful of moments before the long day, the emotional rollercoaster, and the warm, humming environment added up to overwhelm your defenses and you fell fast asleep.

You didn’t wake up when the ship’s captain came back aboard, when the sub-light engines fired, or when the craft slipped into hyperspace.

It was a woman’s voice that finally woke you.

“Ah, hell.”

———————————————————

“Ah, hell,” said a low, masculine voice.

Past and present wove together for an instant, wobbled briefly, and then flew back apart.

You startled awake hard, splaying all your limbs out and scrambling to get them underneath you. A body rushed at you from a few steps away and a hand pressed down firmly on your chest, another on your shoulder. You yelled, all sound and no words.

“Shh, easy,” the voice said. Familiar, but you couldn’t place it. “Easy. You’re safe. I’m here. It’s just me. You’re okay.”

Your foggy panic began to clear, and pieces lazily began drifting into place, albeit at an agonizing, glacial pace.

The owner of the voice seemed to sense your struggle, and kept talking. “You were hit with a stun bolt,” he said, leaning closer. “I tried to wake you up, but you had a seizure or something. It wasn’t safe to stay there, and you’d said you wanted to work with me, so I thought it would be okay if I brought you to my ship. We just dropped into hyperspace.”

“Everything went blue,” you said into the helmet hovering in front of your face. The pressure on your chest eased and the owner of the helmet tilted his head. Half a moment passed, and then he nodded.

“Yeah. You got stunned,” he said by way of explanation. There was a change in the rhythm of his speech from a second ago, you thought, but you couldn’t put your finger on it. “How do you feel?”

“Like I headbutted a sarlacc to death,” you groaned. “Not sure whose death, though. Doesn’t feel like I won.”

“I think you might have hit your head when you fell. Getting stunned doesn’t usually affect people like this.” The modulated quality of his voice was soothing, but his words just made you confused. Your thoughts were like spun sugar, dissolving on contact with the river of your consciousness.

“I got _stunned_?”

“You did,” he said. He danced his fingers over your head, pressing lightly through the fabric over your hair. “Tell me if anything hurts.”

His fingertips found a sensitive spot and you sucked in air through your teeth.

“Found it,” he said, pressing one hand gently to your forehead, turning your head toward him slightly and raising the other hand to fiddle with something near your temple. “Hold still a couple minutes, I’m gonna hit you with some bacta.”

“You hit me with a _bantha_? Why? I’m so nice,” you said. Made sense, though. Felt like you’d been hit with a bantha. “I’ve been nice to you. Was I not nice to you? Am I a dick? Did the bantha hit me for being a dick? Is that why my head hurts?” Maybe the pieces weren’t coming together after all.

“Your head will feel better in just a little while,” he said with a small shake of his head and what sounded like a smile. “No banthas.”

“You promi—No!!” you yelped when he touched the towel on your head to move it aside. A half-thought finally fired and both your hands flew to your head. One pinned his in place overtop your temple, the other clutched fabric to your head. “You can’t.”

“You need medicine,” he said, resolute. “It won’t hurt.”

“My hair,” you said. “You’re not allowed to see. I can do it. Give it here.” You released his hand but kept your grip on the cloth.

He regarded you for a handful of seconds, then spun the bacta in his hand and offered it to you. He pointed at a trigger mechanism with his thumb and said, “Hold it a few inches away. Point the nozzle at the place that hurts and use the trigger to spray it for five whole seconds.”

“You have to turn around,” you said, drawing a circle in the air with the bacta canister. “No peeking.”

“You’ll have to part your hair so the medicine can get in.”

“Yeah, yeah,” you muttered.

“And check the towel on your head for blood,” he added.

“I knowww,” you said, exasperated. “I already have— …a mother,” you finished with a whisper. Your brain couldn’t remember what happened a handful of minutes ago or follow a simple conversation, but it somehow dutifully informed you that you were an orphan. “Ugh. Hurt my own feelings.”

The helmeted man took a slow, deep breath and blew it out. It was some time before he spoke. “I’m sorry,” he said finally.

You dropped your eyes and nodded. You wiggled the canister of bacta at him, looked up briefly, and gestured a shooting motion with your empty hand.

He turned his back to you and stepped out of sight. “I’m still right here,” he said.

You fumbled with the towel—which was not bloodstained—and tried to move your hair to get to your tender scalp. You hissed in discomfort.

“Okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, my hair just… hurts,” you said. You traced your fingertips softly along your skin, trying to feel the extent of the injury so you knew where to spray. Fumbling without the use of sight, you brought the spray up to your head and pulled the trigger. Warm mist settled down around you and made your nose and eyes tingle. The scent prickled at your memory, but you couldn’t say why.

You wrapped your hair back in the towel, tucked in the tail, and said, “I’m done.”

He stepped back into view, then scooped a bag off the floor and bore it up to you. “We left in a hurry, but I grabbed this on the way out,” he said. “If you’re like me, all your stuff is in one place.”

You looked at the bag, searching for familiarity, but found none. You cradled it to your chest anyway. That _did_ feel familiar.

You looked up at him and nodded. “Thank you.”

“You should rest,” he said, handing you a blanket. “When you wake up, you’ll feel better.”

You settled down into the small cot and spread the soft, worn fabric over yourself, then gathered the top corners at your chin. He reached down and straightened an edge by your feet, covering an exposed corner of the cot.

He started to turn away but then lingered with his fingertips on the blanket, and you felt like there was something he wasn’t saying.

“What is it?” you asked.

“You’re speaking Mando’a,” he said, looking down at his hand on the cot and tapping his first two fingers on the cloth. “Ever since you woke up.”

“Oh,” you said. “Am I not supposed to?”

“No, I think you’re supposed to.” He shook his head then nodded as he spoke, which was confusing. “Get some sleep. We’ll talk when you wake up.”

You watched his back turn to you and listened to his heavy footsteps retreat down the corridor.

The gentle hum of the ship curled around you and the throbbing in your head started to ease.

You lay awake, wondering what awaited you when your brain felt better, too curious to fall asleep, until—quite suddenly—you did.

As you slept, past and present sped together, danced around each other, and collided.


	7. Harmonic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Your brain starts to reboot a little. You share a secret your mother made you swear to guard from anyone you wouldn't trust with your life.

Thing was, it didn’t feel like a collision at all.

What felt like an electrical shock inside your brain brought you out of a dreamless sleep. Pain flared behind your left eye for a brief instant and then ebbed like a dying ember. You lay in the humming darkness for a few minutes, mind wandering aimlessly as you splayed your toes and stretched your arms out above your head.

 _Ow_.

The delicious burn of the stretch was interrupted at its peak by a sharp pang in your left shoulder. It felt bruised, but it faded quickly when you relaxed it, so you didn’t worry about it for too long. Aches and pains and bruises in various stages of healing were more or less just part of life for you, between your general clumsiness and your… _career_.

The bag beside the bed caught your attention, and you rummaged around inside. You removed the towel from around your hair, which was still slightly damp from having been bound while it was wet. For now, you rewrapped it in a deep blue muslin, but made a note to let it down to dry soon.

You laid your bare feet on the floor and felt the biting tickle of the metal grates against them, then rose to stand. You took a step and the grates creaked once, but you adapted your gait, making your footfalls silent by habit. You’d done it ever since you were a kid, the better to go unnoticed.

The ship was still in hyperspace, it seemed, based on the absolute dearth of sound outside of the craft’s mechanical hum. You never got enough traveling under your belt to really get used to the eeriness of near-silence. You could hear your own heartbeat, and it put you on edge. What’s more, you could swear that hyperspace had a distinct smell—reminiscent of electricity mixed with dust—even if a spacecraft’s airtight seal meant that was probably ridiculous.

You padded your way around the ship, looking for the cockpit. It wasn’t a very big vessel, but you didn’t bother looking up the first time you looked around, so you overlooked the porthole that led up to the control room. On your second turn through the craft, your eyes caught the ladder and you put your foot on the first rung when a realization hit you: the Mandalorian might not have his helmet in place.

“Hey, are you up there?” You called, assuming the answer but wanting to announce yourself.

“Nope,” said a voice right behind your ear. You spun around on your heel on instinct and used the momentum to strike out at the body behind you. You realized what you were doing while it was happening, and your opponent caught your fist in his gloved hand. Problem was, in such tight proximity, you were aiming to hit with your elbow. You tried to pull back the blow but mostly failed and the clang of bone on beskar that followed a millisecond later rattled your brain and filled the chamber.

“FUCK!” you both called in unison. You curled your torso around your arm, nerves alight with the impact to your oh-so-hilariously-named funny bone. “Maker’s tits,” you swore as you rubbed your arm with the flat of your left hand, then blew out a breath you’d been holding.

You raised your head to look at the Mandalorian and you both regarded each other for a second before erupting into laughter. Hearing genuine, deep, belly-laughter for the first time in ages brought a lightness to your heart and eased the screaming pain in your elbow, if only barely.

“Got a hell of a startle reflex,” he said with a shake of his head after regaining his composure. “Almost knocked me down.”

“Serves you right! Where did you even come from?! I pulled a _blaster_ on you last time, dummy,” you said, slapping his chest plate lightly. “Why would you startle me _again_?”

The Mandalorian shrugged. “Take joy where you can find it,” he said. He gestured to the ladder and started to climb. “Come on up.”

You shook your head slowly at his retreating back and rubbed your throbbing elbow. That dude was truly impossible to predict.

You awkwardly scrabbled up through the opening, trying to do the work with your legs and not your arms. It was going well enough until you gracelessly slammed your sore shoulder into the porthole on the way through and cursed with feeling. Pain dazzled your vision for a minute and, still clinging to the ladder, you rested your forehead on the floor to regain your composure.

“What’s wrong?”

“Must’ve hurt my shoulder again back on Nevarro,” you said into the floor grates as your shoulder throbbed. “And I just whanged it against the doorway coming up. Sore elbow wasn’t enough, I guess.” You sighed. “I’m fine. I just… live up here now, probably.”

“Here,” he said, voice closer than before. He’d crossed the space to crouch next to the ladder. He placed one hand on the flat of your back and extended the other to you, to pull you up the rest of the way. Your instinct was to wave it away and prove yourself by gritting your teeth and doing it on your own, but a memory bubbled up in your mind and stopped you.

_“I can DO it, Mama,” said a tiny, exasperated version of yourself._

_“Of course you can, mayaveska. You can do anything,” your mother said in her slow, luxuriant accent. Nevertheless, she scooped you up and held you aloft while you plucked two heavy, perfect apples from a branch of the mighty tree before you. “But it makes me so happy to help you and hold you. Sometimes we give the people we care about a gift by letting them give gifts to us.”_

_“Helping is a gift?” you asked. The world didn’t always make sense. How was helping a present? PRESENTS were presents._

_“It can be. If we’ve humility enough to allow it.” She lowered you to the ground, planting a kiss in the crook of your neck on the way down. You could taste the scent of her when you giggled. Incense and tree blossoms, with a hint of sugar. She tucked a strand of hair behind your ear, which made your scalp tingle, and said, “Pride has no place in a tender heart, my sweet.”_

Then your memory flashed back to the note that had been left with the supplies the morning after you’d met your companion. _“There’s a fine line between independence and pride. Walk it wisely.”_

You looked up into the visor of the Mandalorian’s helmet and gave him your right arm. He grabbed you above the elbow and between the two of you, you got both feet into the cockpit without any pain.

He dropped his hand from your arm, but lingered a second with his hand on your back, pressing you forward and gesturing to a chair behind the pilot’s seat.

“Here,” he said. “Want me to take a look at that shoulder?”

You smushed down your knee-jerk refusal and truly considered his offer, but still shook your head. “No, that’s okay. I’ve used up a small fortune’s worth of bacta already, I’ll heal up okay.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard today,” he said. “Let me see.”

“It’s probably, like, the _only_ thing you’ve heard today,” you said. “I just woke up.”

“Then you have time to say something dumber later,” he said, swiveling your chair away and turning your back to him.

You tugged your overshirt up, slowly and awkwardly, since moving either of your arms hurt. You grew more and more frustrated at how frail you felt and how there was no way for you to move without pain and how at least half of it was your own damn fault. When your elbow got hung up in your sleeve, you hissed in through your teeth and tears of overwhelm sprang to your eyes.

“You don’t have to fight a war today,” the Mandalorian said softly in Mando’a and rested a hand on your unhurt shoulder. “You’ll still be a warrior.”

A small sob escaped you before you could clamp it down. Tears tumbled down both cheeks and pattered into your lap. You were glad that you had your back turned away, but your cheeks still burned in embarrassment. The sound of your heartbeat pounded in your ears, steady and quick.

His thumb brushed one reassuring arc along the base of your neck, grounding you as you took a shaky, steadying breath and blew it out through pursed lips.

He gave a light squeeze to your shoulder and then released it. “Here,” he said. He grasped your right elbow with a light touch and gently pulled the sleeve off of your arm with his other hand. He gathered the fabric up near your neck and peered at the back of your shoulder around the strap of your undershirt. A tight sigh poured from the modulator in his helmet. _Uh-oh._

“What is it?” You asked.

“An ugly bruise the size of a meiloorun fruit,” he said. He pulled the shirt up further and looked around the top and front of your shoulder. “Wraps all the way around. No wonder you hurt.”

“Huh,” you said. It really hadn’t hurt that much until you hit it on the porthole, but it was red-hot and bone deep now.

“My guess is you dislocated your shoulder when you hit the ground after you got stunned, and then I put it back in while I was bringing you back to the ship and getting you onto the cot,” he said. “Only time I’ve seen that bruising is from a dislocation or a tear.”

Your cheeks grew warm again at the thought of him having to carry you through the pathways of Nevarro and all the way back to the spaceport.

“Seen the bruising on another person or yourself?” you asked, more as a distraction than anything else.

“Mostly myself. Reducing your own shoulder isn’t easy.” He spun your chair back around to face him. “I’ll grab a tube of bacta. We have time, so we don’t need to use a bandage.”

“No, seriously, I’ll be fine,” you said. Bacta ointment was way cheaper than a bacta bandage, since the latter was considered emergency first aid, and you knew he specified to ease your guilt. But the idea of wasting yet more resources on your inexplicably feeble body brought a lump up into your throat.

“You’re thinking with your helmet right now,” he said, slipping back into Mando’a and pressing his hand on your crown. Then he moved to touch his first finger to your forehead and added, “not with your head.”

You felt tears fill your eyes again as he turned away. You trained your eyes on the back of his helmet, and when he turned to face you to descend the ladder, you dropped your gaze and gave a wan smile to the floor grates. His glance slid off of you as he clattered down to the deck below.

Was it just your imagination, or was he, like, a _thousand_ percent warmer toward you since he brought you aboard his ship? Most likely an effect of being on his home turf, you reckoned.

Something about his demeanor was familiar, though. His bearing, maybe, or the cadence of his voice, you weren’t sure. It made you feel safe, for some reason, and safe wasn’t something you were used to feeling, so you were on your back foot with every interaction lately.

You looked at the sickly purple splotch spreading from your upper chest over the back of your shoulder. With slow, cautious movement, you brought your hand to your sore shoulder to probe at it. It was so odd to think that you could have sustained such an injury and never actually felt the pain of it, just the aftereffects. Almost as though it never really happened to you at all.

As if to prove you really _had_ been injured, an ache zapped you behind your left eye again. It blazed impossibly hot and bright for a quick moment and you cried out, but by the time the sound hit your ears, the pain was already dimming.

_“My little beastling, you must learn control. Waters of rage run deep, and they will drown you.”_

_You were seven years old again, curled up in your mother’s lap as she stroked your hair and comforted you. Your head hurt then, too. She swiped at your nose with her handkerchief, and you saw blood on it as she folded it away._

_“He wouldn’t let me play, and then he called me Outsider and said you were—“ you clenched your little fists and grunted, angry all over again. “I couldn’t help it, Mama. I shouted at him—I know I shouldn’t shout, I’m sorry—but I didn’t know it would be so LOUD. I didn’t know my voice could go that loud. I didn’t know he’d fall down.”_

_“It isn’t your fault, mayaveska, it’s mine,” she said. She touched a fingertip to your forehead and traced a swirling, symmetrical path with a delicate touch. It was something she did to comfort and relax you, and it always worked. “You see, there is a darkness in all things, just as there is lightness. Only we can decide for ourselves which we will let grow stronger: our darkness or our light. I hope that you will always choose to be a light in darkness, sweetling. To use your sense of fairness and loyalty to fight for what you love, rather than against what you hate.”_

_She pressed both of her hands to your head, then bent down and kissed your temple. You felt warm and bright, like you felt when you and Mama napped in the sun on your secret shore, and the pressure and pain in your head evanesced. You breathed in the familiar smell of her and felt her silken hair tickle your face._

_You let go of the anger and resentment in your belly, resolved to forget the stupid village boy’s name and not let him make you angry again. All that mattered was here in this room—you and Mama, just the two of you, and you’d always have each other._

The sound of footsteps brought you out of your reverie. You turned to the ladder just as the Mandalorian’s helmet came into view.

He held aloft a small tube and then tilted his head and stilled. “Does it smell like incense up here?”

Your heart skipped a beat. You drew in a deep breath and could just barely detect a hint of earthy smell to the air. How odd.

“Yeah, uh… yeah, a little,” you said. A notion struck you. “Wait, you can smell in that thing?”

“I have to breathe _air_ ,” he said, tilting his head down slightly to emphasize the last word.

“I just thought it was, like, filtered or something,” you said. “Or piped in, maybe, I don’t know.”

He took his empty hand and wiggled his fingers under his helmet. “It’s open to air,” he said. “A little motor here—“ he tapped the side of the helmet, “—creates airflow.”

“So you don’t have to breathe in the same moist air over and over.”

He nodded, then gestured a circle with the tube of bacta. You spun your back toward him as he took a knee and gathered your overshirt out of the way again.

From behind your shoulder, the Mandalorian muttered a mouthful of blasphemy in blended Mando’a and Basic.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” you said with a smile. “It looks worse than it feels.”

“Wanna bet?” he replied, more statement than question. He dropped the tube of bacta into the chair next to you with a bounce and a quiet thud.

“What do you mean?”

He spun you around so fast that you almost slid out of the chair. You were directly at eye level, and he leaned backward just a little.

“The bruise is gone,” he said.

You stared blankly at him for a second, then turned your head to look down at your shoulder. You brushed the unblemished skin with the fingertips of your other hand, and pressed down to see if it was still sore to the touch. When it felt normal, you rolled your shoulder forward and back, then raised your arm above your head seeking the pain that had been so unmistakeable just a moment ago. You found none. 

You returned your gaze to your companion and shook your head. “I don’t—“ You stammered, still shaking your head. You opened your mouth to speak, but no more words came.

The Mandalorian dropped from his kneel and sat hard on the floor. He planted both feet flat on the metal grates and rested his forearms on his raised knees. He splayed both hands out in a questioning gesture.

“My mother,” you said. “I was just thinking about my mother. About a time when I got hurt fighting with another kid. Some shitty little village boy who made a crappy remark about my mom. And she pulled me into her lap and comforted me and—Maker, this sounds so stupid—she kissed my head and made the pain go away. Not little-kid, kissy boo-boo, all-better nonsense—she _actually made the pain go away_. From a splitting headache to nothing, just like that.” You snapped your fingers. “And then you came back up here.”

“Your mother,” he said with some confusion. “Who died when you were little.”

“I know,” you said. “I know how it sounds. And I don’t have an answer. But you said! You said it smelled like incense when you came up here. My mother _always_ smelled like incense and flowers.”

Your companion took you in silently.

“I’m just as lost as you are,” you said quietly in Mando’a. You slid down off of the chair to sit opposite him on the floor. “But I swear, I’m not keeping the truth from you, and I don’t know what just happened. I know there’s been times I haven’t answered your questions before, but this is not one of those times.”

He shook his head, just barely. You didn’t know what to say, either.

A thought occurred to you.

“A show of good faith,” you said. You reached behind your head—with perfectly painless, unrestricted movement—and untucked the tail of your headscarf. You unwound the twisted blue fabric and uncovered your hair, then parted it in two and brushed it forward over your shoulders. You felt the still-damp parts of your hair grow cold against your scalp when the air touched them.

The Mandalorian cocked his head and stretched a hand toward your face. He took a lock of your hair in his fingers and looked at it for a moment then looked back to you. You kept your eyes on his visor and didn’t avert your gaze.

Deep silver waves spilled through his fingers. You’d never seen another creature with your same hair color, not even living among the Ming Po, whose hair was gray or black. Your hair wasn’t gray, it was true silver, and it shone bright and metallic. 

“Like beskar,” he said finally, matching your use of Mando’a.

You nodded and he took back his hand. “My mother made me promise not to show my hair to anyone I wouldn’t trust with my life,” you said. “Repeatedly. She said it would put me in danger. She never said why. Probably didn’t realize she was going to run out of time to make me understand.”

You took up a piece of hair and looked at it while you twirled it around your fingers.

“‘ _More is at stake than I can say,’_ ” you said in your mother’s accent. “’ _The impacts of our choices reach far beyond our own grasp._ _The armor you choose to wear will decide more fates than just your own, mayaveska.’_ ”

You shook your head after a moment and shrugged. “Whatever all that means.”

“I was thinking about that,” he said after a brief silence, transitioning back into Basic. You looked up in curiosity and furrowed your brow just a bit. 

“‘Mayaveska,’” he clarified. “I think it’s ‘my _ad bes’ika_.’ A mix of Basic and Mando’a.”

You felt a smile crinkle the corners of your eyes as they welled up. Hearing someone else use that endearment aloud after so many years felt like a fist around your heart in the best way. You dropped your gaze into your lap and nodded. 

“Yeah,” you murmured. “Yeah, that sounds right. She used to call me ‘beastling,’ so ‘my _ad bes’ika_ ’ makes sense.”

“‘My sweet little beast child,’” he translated in a whisper as a tear spilled down your cheek and he moved to catch it with his thumb. “I can see that in you.”

You lifted your eyes to look into the horizontal bar of his helmet visor. The helm—which hid his face from view and once struck you as an obstacle to being able to understand each other—no longer seemed to be a barrier between you. Your heart felt light and full and _known_ as the other Mandalorian leaned forward and bumped his forehead to yours with a light _bonk_. 


	8. Waltz

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You make yet another new friend. Maybe.

“I understand you were being loyal to your mother,” the Mandalorian said a couple hours later, crouching to set a plate of food on your lap while you sat cross-legged on the floor, tucking your scarf back around your hair. “And I know you don’t know me that well. But from now on… just… I want you to know that you don’t have to hide stuff from me.”

You snorted before you could get ahold of yourself, and the Mandalorian froze midway through standing back up. He looked at you, still and silent, and a wave of shame washed over you.

“Sorry. That was rude,” you said. You dropped your gaze into your lap and then looked back up, twisting the fingers of one hand in the grip of the other. “But… I don’t know, man. Sounds nice and all, but you go all mister mean robot mode and you’re pretty fuckin’ scary. Just hard to think of you as the fuzzy confidante type after that.”

“Mean robot mode makes the job easier,” he said with a shrug. “Sometimes I forget to turn it off. Sometimes I can’t.” He gestured at the plate of food as if to remind you it was there.

“Yeah, no shit,” you said, shoving two bites of food into your mouth at once. “I thought you were about to torture me for information earlier.”

You swallowed and looked up at him from your plate as the heat of some warm spice spread across your tongue. He tilted his head at you, body still. “On Nevarro,” you said, gesturing over your shoulder with the corner of some kind of breadlike ration. He didn’t seem to understand. “When you turned off the light and grabbed my arm,” you continued.

“I—Your _blaster_ was on the table,” he said. He sounded confused.

“And?”

“You thought I was going to _torture_ you, your weapon was at your elbow, and you didn’t shoot me?” he said, genuine bafflement in his voice. “Maybe you really _aren’t_ Mandalorian.”

He laughed, a small huff that made you want to smile even though it was at your expense.

“Hey, be nice to me or I’ll tell people you sing.”

“No one would believe you,” he said simply, with a single shake of his head. “But listen…” He took a breath. “I know that we don’t know each other very well—“

“Yeah, I know it too, you just said it ten seconds ago,” you said with what might’ve been a smirk, if your mouth hadn’t been full of bread. “What’re you–”

“Shh,” he said, holding up a single gloved finger. “For thirty seconds, shh.”

Maker’s tits, he’d _rehearsed_ this. He’d practiced what he was going to say. He had a mental script he was trying to follow, and your sass was derailing his delivery. The realization sent a whisper of mirth across your face and you felt the muscles behind your ears tighten as you fought back a smile. It was the cutest, most unexpected thing to happen to you lately. Well… the most unexpectedly- _pleasant_ thing, at least.

“I’d been on my own for a long time, but—“ He paused to shake his head. “These last few months, I’ve found myself… wanting to be a part of something. To not be alone. I’ve offered to hire just about everyone who’s proven trustworthy lately—an old farmer, a veteran of the Rebellion, even an old IG unit—”

“I thought you didn’t like droids,” you piped up.

“Don’t. But that one was different,” he said. “Point is, I’m old enough to know I don’t want to be a scary robot except when I have to be. Mandalorians are…”

The warm silence of hyperspace settled into the cockpit as he searched for the words.

“Clan and kin above all,” you said after the quiet went a little too long. You laid a your fingertips flat against your chest, the small lump of your necklace pressing against your skin. “Warriors don’t fight for themselves. You’re just a mercenary unless you’ve got something else to fight for.”

He nodded. A beat later, he added, “And I do, now.”

Your heart fluttered and your brows knit together. Equal parts sunshine and skepticism bubbled in your chest. This dude had technically known you for months, sure, but you’d only spent a very little bit of time together. A cumulative, like… two and a half days, max. You weren’t on a “something to fight for” level.

But you _had_ fought for each other. Almost a handful of times now. And it was _really fucking nice_ to have someone around who understood the parts of you that you didn’t even understand yourself. You’d spent a big chunk of these last couple hours excitedly piecing your history together and putting it in context with his help. There were a lot of “Yeah, that’s how Mandalorians do things” moments, and some of his mannerisms and turns of phrase reminded you so acutely of your mother that it made it hard to breathe.

You’d been without family for so long that you didn’t dare hope to find yourself being folded into someone else’s… except that some part of you clearly _had._

“A foundling,” he said, his voice so low it was nearly a whisper.

_Hmm._

Not exactly how you’d want to have your relationship characterized, you thought with a hint of a frown. You weren’t some kid that needed protecting—you’d thought you’d shown that by fighting off, like, three ambushes at his side. A bitch gets stun-bolted _one time_ , and suddenly they’re not a fascist-murdering badass anymore? Unfair.

He tapped at his forearm and a little black pod hovered toward him from the corner of the cockpit. The doors hissed open and inside lay a tiny sleeping body, its enormous green ears and the top of its cotton-fuzzed head just visible among the mass of brown robes and blankets it was nestled into.

A small noise burst its way out of you and you covered your mouth with both hands. You breathed a quiet mouthful of blasphemy into them and felt your cheeks warm under your fingertips from a combination of exhaled air and embarrassment.

_Not you, dummy. Never you._

Hot shame burned behind your eyes and they welled with unbidden tears.

_No._

You took a breath.

 _An emotion for another time_ , you thought, stuffing the half-formed feeling down into the box behind your heart and closing the lid. You wrenched your focus back to the cradle in front of you. The little being stirred at the faint sounds of the cockpit and opened its huge brown eyes. You’d never seen one of its kind before. It blinked slowly at the Mandalorian, then turned its gaze on you.

It sat up in the pod and cocked its head at you. The gesture was identical to the Mandalorian’s head-tilt—like father, like foundling, apparently–and it brought a bittersweet smile to your eyes. You sat up a little straighter on the floor, finding yourself more or less eye-to-eye with the creature.

You raised a hand slowly in dumbstruck greeting, not sure what to say. The child mimicked the gesture, lifting its three-fingered hand in return.

Suddenly, a warmth began in the fingertips of your raised hand and flowed down your arm. Almost like submerging your hand into bathwater. You brought your hand up in front of your face, but it looked the same as ever. You rubbed your thumb across your fingertips, brushed the opposite hand along your forearm, but the sensation persisted and continued to spread.

“I feel weird,” you said, an edge of concern in your voice. “Something’s not right.” You turned toward the Mandalorian. It wasn’t an _unpleasant_ feeling, but it was odd and you had no explanation for it, and that was cause enough for worry. Especially after a head injury.

“What is it?” the Mandalorian asked, sliding from his seat and onto the floor of the cockpit, an arm’s reach away.

“I don’t—“ you began to answer, but trailed off. Your gaze turned to the little green body in the cradle, whose hand was still outstretched. You noticed that its eyes had drifted closed, but it was still upright, so it wasn’t asleep. You felt your brow furrow and the line of warmth washed across your chest, down your belly, and up your neck, spreading across your whole body. You felt aglow with it for a moment, from head to toe, then felt a gentle wave brush over you and the feeling disappeared.

The instant the sensation passed, the child opened its eyes and lowered its hand. It kept its huge glassy eyes locked on yours, but it didn’t seem…hostile. Just curious.

“Hey,” the Mandalorian said, resting a hand on your shoulder. He bent his neck down to bring his visor directly into your eye line. “What’s the matter?”

With a barely-audible _whump_ , the small body in the cradle fell back into its blankets. The Mandalorian turned his head toward the sound and then back to you.

“Shit,” he muttered. He grabbed your other shoulder and turned you toward him. “Are you okay? Did he—?“

“Fine,” you said with a shake of your head. “I’m fine. It just… I don’t know. I felt warm. But it’s gone now. Was that…?” You glanced briefly in the direction of the pod with a tilt of your head, then looked back to the Mandalorian. Your chest tingled a little, just below the hollow of your throat. “How?”

He mirrored your gesture, shaking his head then pivoting to look at his foundling.

“Still trying to figure that out,” he said.


	9. Verismo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Readers can have a little whump, as a treat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Glossary  
> trac'ika: little fire; fiery one. A term of endearment.

Hours melted into days into weeks, and you fell into a rhythm. You spent your days being endlessly tracked by the Mandalorian’s foundling, scarcely able to take five minutes to yourself in the fresher without muffled sounds of confused discontent and tiny green fingers intruding from the other side of the door.

After one such failed attempt at a moment’s solitude, you looked quickly at the mirror, admired the incredible bags under your eyes and the pale cast to your skin, tucked up a loose tail of your blue headscarf, and slid open the door. You looked down at the tiny creature, who was rising to his feet now that the mystery of “ _Where and How Dare?_ ” had been solved. You threw your hands out to the side (to the degree the cramped space allowed) and asked for about the three-hundredth time, “What is your **_deal_** , guy?”

He replied the same way he always did, with a prick of his gigantic ears and a tilt of his head, his mouth opening slightly. You scooped him up with a groan of effort—you were dead-ass tired and he was heavier than he looked, but you knew from experience that he wasn’t going to budge from the doorway otherwise—and wandered over to the small galley with him in one arm. You opened a storage bin and considered your choices. You were slightly nauseated with fatigue, but you knew you needed to eat something, and so did he.

“What do you think, goober? Gray unlabeled package—“ you pointed at a vacuum-sealed ration in a dull matte wrapper and then another that gleamed, “—or **_silver_** unlabeled package?”

Silence. He just stared at you and swiveled his ears ever-so-slightly.

“Yeah, silver seems like the right call. We deserve the shiny stuff.” You plucked the metallic ration off the top of the pile and handed it to the foundling. “Got it?”

You closed and latched the crate, then turned toward the ladder to the control room, looking down to see if the child was still managing to keep lunch in his scrabbly little mitts (he was). You stopped abruptly and startled when your peripheral vision detected an unexpected, body-shaped obstacle in your path. You threw up the fist of your free hand and pivoted the hip the kid was pressed against so your body shielded his.

A familiar soft huff of laughter triggered both relief and annoyance.

“Why do you keep DOING THAT!”

The Mandalorian shrugged and said, “Take joy where you can find it.” Same as he always did when he scared the shit out of you five times a day.

You looked down at the foundling and grasped the package he held in his hands. “May I?” You pulled gently and he released his bounty.

“Thank you,” you said, then looked up into the visor of the Mandalorian’s helm and whacked him on the side of the head with your meal. He stood unflinching, stock-still like nothing had happened. Infuriating. You returned the package to the child and said with a nod, “‘Ppreciate it.” He accepted it back solemnly.

“How are you so damn quiet in all that metal, anyway?” you asked.

“You’re pretty light-footed yourself,” he replied.

“Handy for a thief,” you said with a shrug.

“For a bounty hunter, too,” he said, reaching out to pluck the kid from your arm and then turning to the control room. The top of the fuzzy head peeked over a smooth beskar-clad shoulder and you could swear his eyes were a little bigger and brighter when the Mandalorian held him.

“Come on, _trac’ika_ ,” he called back to you, one foot on the ladder to the cockpit. “I want to show you something.”

“You know, you always scare me when your foundling is in my hands,” you said, straightening your necklace under your tunic. “One of these days you’re gonna make me drop him.”

“Doubt it,” was his only reply, called down from the room above.

“What do you mean, ‘doubt it’? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I am greased-porg clumsy under _ideal_ conditions, friend, much less when you’ve startled me for the eleven-thousandth time. It’s called, like…” you paused as the word you wanted left your brain, then started muttering. “Uh… fuckin’… Something-fatigue…”

Just one of many types of fatigue fogging your brain at that moment, really.

You reached the top of the ladder and rose to your feet on the floor of the cockpit. The Mandalorian stood watching you, and as you turned away from the porthole and moved toward your seat, he moved quickly and sent something flying at you.

Your hands reached out for the earth-toned blur and your body moved into its path. You snapped it out of the air and clutched it to your chest with a wallop that half knocked the wind out of you. You looked down and found your arms full of a squirmy green kid who happily giggled in your arms, crinkling the package of the ration he somehow still held in his tiny fists.

“What it’s called,” the Mandalorian said in that warm, modulated voice, tipping his head forward at the bundle in your grasp, “is ‘response enhancement.’”

You looked from him to the little one and back again, and then the confusion on your face turned to a scowl.

“You’re, what, physically and psychologically conditioning me to _reflexively_ _defend your kid_?”

He gestured vaguely with a twitch of one shoulder.

“You… absolute… just… sneak-assed… diabolical… fuckin’,” you stammered.

“Genius?” the Mandalorian suggested. “Hero? Dad of the Year?”

“ ** _Nerf-herder!_** ” You whapped his chest plate with a flat hand for emphasis.

A beat passed in silence, and then he breathed out a burst of laughter at you again. You focused back on the child, who proffered the meal packet back to you.

“No thanks, bud,” you said, lowering the two of you to the floor. “We better not hit him again. Look at him, he’s clearly already lost his damn marbles. We need him to be able to fly the ship, right? Until you learn. You’re getting there.”

He’d woken up from a nap last week while you and the Mandalorian were in the cargo hold, and somehow seized the controls from the autopilot. You were still bruised and sore from the Mandalorian’s helmet cracking you in the hipbone when you both went flying.

You took the meal from his little hands and unwrapped it, the child watching keenly. As always, you broke the protein ration in half and offered the bigger piece to him. He took it and gobbled it down in one bite, not stopping to chew as far as you could tell.

“You have teeth, you know,” you said, gesturing at him with the remaining chunk of meat and then biting off a piece. “You should use them.” You made a show of chewing the food, complete with _um-num-num_ noises. The child just toddled off, looking for something to play with now that his lunch was eaten. He never really wanted anything but the protein.

You shook your head at his little back and tilted your head up to find your companion watching you.

“Here,” you gestured at the floor across from you and patted it with your free hand. “Pull up a seat. What did you want to show me?”

He stopped halfway through sitting down, as if he just remembered why he called you up to the cockpit. He straightened back up to standing and reached his hand out to help you off the floor, then jerked his head over to the flight control panel and said, “Ah. Over here.”

You held the meat between your teeth to free your hands, then grasped his forearm with one hand and pushed off the ground with the other. You practically levitated to your feet with his assistance, and he pulled you forward as he let go of your arm, propelling you toward the console.

You rested your good hip against the control panel and watched as the Mandalorian tinkered a moment, then a display screen flickered from radar to video message.

“Mando!” a middle-aged human called from the screen. “I hope everything is okay after… the last time we saw each other.” Clearly uncomfortable, he continued on briskly. Must be a good story in there somewhere. “I did some digging—very subtle, don’t worry—and I think I tracked down the clan you were asking about. The village burned a ways back, but they’ve rebuilt and it’s been more or less peaceful since. There’s a navpoint and some other information attached to this message. Couple photos. Hope it helps. Can’t imagine why anyone would want to live on that frozen rock, but sounds like there’s a lot of ex-Imperial dogs sniffing around out that way lately, so it’s even more miserable than usual. So, uh… If you were planning a visit, Mando, I’d wait.”

The Mandalorian pressed a button and the man vanished. He turned his head to look up at you and waited. You put the last of the meat in your mouth, then raised your eyebrows and shook your head with a question mark on your face. “He ruin your vacation plans, or…?”

He looked down at the console for a second, then back at you. He clenched and then flexed his hand and you felt him consider saying something, but he decided not to and instead pressed another couple buttons. The screen flicked to a photograph—a snow-covered seaside cliff with an orchard just visible in a frozen meadow below, butting up against a forest.

Your hands flew to your mouth and a muffled cry escaped you. You pressed your hands to the edge of the console, leaning closer to the monitor.

The photo changed, this one showing a town square in winter. A massive, bare cherry tree rose up in its center, stone buildings scattered around it.

“Carlac,” you breathed. You hadn’t been able to recall the name of the planet for the life of you, but the moment you saw it, its name leapt to your tongue.

 _Home_. Such that it was. Or used to be, for a time.

Granted, you hadn’t seen it in well over ten years and you’d never seen the trees without blossoms on them—or maybe that was just a trick of rosy childhood memory—but there was no mistaking it. That little cottage in the upper right corner, you could just barely see the front door before the photo cut it off, but it was definitely yours and Mama’s. Once upon a time. There had been fewer buildings then, but that one you remembered.

The image on the screen changed again, to a similar image, except there were people visible in the town square. You saw several Ming Po, two other humans, and then your blood ran cold when you spotted two Stormtroopers in the background, their blasters at the ready as they walked side by side through the village.

“What the hell are _they_ doing there?” you asked, your mouth gone dry and stomach queasy. “I don’t remember ever seeing the Empire growing up. Not ’til I went off-world.”

You racked your brain for what there might be on Carlac that would be of interest to the fallen Empire. “I wish I could remember the stuff I for—“

The picture switched and you beheld a tall, white-haired woman in a long, sleek gown standing shoulder to shoulder with a man in Imperial robes. She gestured with a long, slender finger, pointing at something not visible in the photograph. Your mind went blank, and you found your whole body containing just one word, which you breathed out with the last of your composure:

“ _Mama_?” Your voice sounded tinged with madness, even to your own ears. You felt your face pale.

The Mandalorian’s head whipped around to look at you and then snapped back to the screen. You stretched a shaking, numb hand toward the screen and touched the image of her face with a finger. You both leaned closer in unison. He turned to look at you again and began with some hesitancy, “I don’t—“

And then, quite suddenly, your knees buckled underneath you, and you slumped forward against the console and down toward the floor.

You felt your companion jump up next to you. He hooked an arm underneath yours and guided you gently into a heap on the ground.

“Hey,” the Mandalorian said, squeezing your upper arm. He took off a glove and tapped your face softly but insistently. “Look at me.”

It took a Herculean effort, but you pulled your focus to the visor in his helmet after a moment.

“Your pupils are huge,” he said. He shined his flashlight in your eyes and you groaned your discomfort and blenched away from it. You felt a couple more light squeezes of your upper arm and he said, “Hey. You gotta look at me.”

Your head flared with pain and you reeled from nausea. You felt your heart pound and your skin grow slick with sweat as you wrestled your eyes open to fix your gaze on the Mandalorian again. He beamed his light at your face again and you held still as long as you could, until your whole body roiled and you pushed yourself away from him with the last of your strength and retched. Heaves seized you for what felt like minutes, but nothing came up.

A distant part of you made a realization. “Kid,” you panted, swatting the Mandalorian’s leg urgently. “Go.”

“He can’t heal on—“

“No,” you moaned and retched again. “Food.”

It took him a second to figure out what you meant, and then he was all action.

“Dummy,” you mumbled.

He jumped to his feet, crossed the cockpit in one stride, and scooped up the foundling, who squealed in delight at the sudden change in altitude but seemed fine. The Mandalorian gave him a quick once-over, shined the light in his eyes, and then crossed the room again, put him in his pod, and closed it.

You blew out a tiny breath of relief, and the effort made you heave.

“I’ll be right back,” the Mandalorian said, already halfway down the ladder to the deck below. He wrapped his hand around your ankle, the only part of you within reach, and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “It’s gonna be okay.” The door hissed closed and he disappeared.

Easy for him to say. _He’d_ still be conscious when he got back to the cockpit.

You gave it your best, even going so far as to pinch the inside of your arm to try and keep the encroaching darkness at bay. You were just so _tired_. You’re supposed to sleep when you’re sick, right? Just a little nap couldn’t hurt. You stopped fighting it, and that was all it took.

The next instant, a searing pain in your chest wrenched you out of the dark. You groaned and opened your eyes, slapping feebly at the source of the pain. When your vision came into focus, you could see the Mandalorian leaning over you, grinding his knuckles into your sternum.

“I’ll cut it out when you do,” came his even, harmonic voice. “Stay awake and I’ll be nice.”

“Mean robot mode,” you grumbled with your eyes closed again. Your brain and mouth both felt full of cotton, but you weren’t retching for the moment.

He breathed out a small laugh and moved his hand to your forearm. “I let you sleep through the shots,” he said, “but now you gotta talk to me.”

“You take care of me too much,” you said. “I was supposed to help you.”

“You help me plenty. Hell, you probably saved my life today.”

“Hmm?” you asked in genuine confusion.

“That ration wasn’t spoiled, it was poisoned,” he said. You made a _duh_ noise and he continued, “If I’d been on my own… Could have been bad. For me _and_ the kid.”

You hadn’t considered that.

“Who tried to poison you?”

“They better hope I don’t figure it out,” he said, voice tight. After a moment, he squeezed your arm and added quietly, “I’m sorry. It should have been me. It was my enemy, you shouldn’t have gotten hurt.”

“They’re officially my enemy now too. Though I definitely would have figured it out faster,” you said with an attempt at a smile. “It’s like you’ve never been poisoned before.” You patted the Mandalorian’s hand that was resting on your arm, then grasped his wrist. “No. I’m glad it was me.”

“Why?”

You shrugged. “I like you.” It was easier to be honest with your eyes closed. “Plus, after I save your life ten times, I probably get a puppy or something.”

“Maybe twenty.”

A couple minutes ticked by in silence, and just as you began to drift off, the Mandalorian gave your arm a squeeze and said softly, “Stay with me.”

“Was she there?” you asked, hating how childlike and small your voice sounded. Hating the hope. “Was she real?”

The gentle brush of his thumb back and forth over your skin was all the answer you needed. You were glad you kept your eyes closed, but you felt a tear spill down your face anyway.

“I’m sorry,” he said, swiping at the tear with a fingertip. “It was the poison.”

“I had her back for a minute,” you said. “She was alive. Almost worth being poisoned.”

“Almost,” he agreed.

“Will you do me a favor?” you asked.

“Yes.”

“Please don’t let me fall asleep,” you said, swallowing a sob but too weak to stop your chin from wobbling. “I hate it there. I’m just so tired but I don’t want to go back. Please.”


	10. Legato

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You finally come clean about why you're so goddamn tired all the time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Glossary  
> shig: a broth that's made with whatever's around and often flavored with behot  
> behot: an herb with mild stimulant, antiseptic, and antinausea properties, often used in shig  
> bev'ikad: An insult about the size of one's manhood. (lit. "needle-blade")  
> (I made that one up, kinda. Or stretched the limits of how contractions work in Mando'a. I'm not sorry.)

The nights had their own rhythm, too. From the moment the kid bunked down for the evening, you fought sleep as ferociously as possible, spending hours scribbling down every event and discovery and connection the day had brought you until exhaustion overtook you and you nodded off in the quiet, buzzing room where your cot was. Then the dream crept in from the shadows and seized you.

For weeks, you’d had the same dream every night: you were trapped in a blinding-white room, and no matter what you did, you couldn’t move or escape. You heard nothing inside the room, saw nothing but a whiteness so pure and oppressive that it blotted out everything else, and you felt… nothing at all. No heat, no cold, no hunger, no wonder, no comfort or discomfort, no contentment or fear. It was like being held in stasis while conscious, and time seemed to drag on for an eternity. You spent months or longer in this prison every single night, and you hadn’t gotten any real rest in ages. Your whole body screamed in discomfort these days, and you tried your damndest to keep it from rolling downhill onto your companion and his foundling, but it took constant effort.

That was the explanation the Mandalorian wrestled out of you a few hours after he promised to keep you awake, once the medications had worn down enough that you were capable of semi-intelligently stringing a few words together.

“So if I’ve been more of a dick lately,” you said, making a _cheers_ gesture with a steaming mug of broth, “that’s why.”

You were in the control room, him in the pilot’s chair and you in the jump seat. He sat facing you, his arms crossed over his chest as he listened.

“Why didn’t you say something?” he asked.

“Why the hell would I, a grown woman, go crying to my boss that I had a bad dream?”

“I’m not your _boss_ ,” he said, and you could hear the eye-roll in his voice. Impressive.

“True,” you said. “‘Boss’ gives the impression that you would have _paid_ me at some point,” you added with a raised brow and tilt of your head.

Without shifting his gaze, he reached to his hip and chucked a small leather pouch at you. You moved the hand with the mug off to the side so it wasn’t over your lap and snatched the bag out of the air with your empty hand just before it whacked you in the chest. It was heavy and made a clanky, crunchy sound. You could feel several different shapes of currency inside.

“Ooh, little touchy,” you said with a dip of your chin. You smiled and tossed it back to him, then raised your empty hand in a placating gesture. You drew your legs up into your chair and shifted around so you were sitting cross-legged in the seat. You leaned forward, cradling the mug in both hands and resting your forearms on your ankles. You took a deep breath and looked at the Mandalorian for a moment. “I’m sorry. It started weeks ago, and I didn’t know how bad it would get. Once is a bad dream. Twice is, ‘ _weird, I had the same dream again._ ’ By the time I admitted to myself that something fucky was afoot, it felt like it had been too long to say anything. And what could you do about it anyway? I mean, you’re scary as shit sometimes, yeah, but I think my brain knows you can’t kick _its_ ass.

“Plus, y’know, it sounds nuts,” you shrugged a minute later, then drained the last of your _shig_.

“If I _were_ your boss,” he said, his voice softer but clearly still a little annoyed, “I would say that anything that affects your ability to do your job is my business.”

“Phew,” you breathed and mimed wiping your brow. “Good thing you’re not my boss.”

He gave a tiny shake of his head, rose to his feet, and took the mug from your hands. He lingered over you for a breath or two, then tapped his fingers on the mug and turned toward the ladder.

“I don’t sleep much either,” he said.

“I know,” you replied, barely above a whisper. You didn’t know what else to say. You’d heard him awake and moving around at all hours, and never once come upon him asleep. You had no idea where he even _would_ sleep, come to think of it. You wondered for the first time if it was his bed you were sleeping in.

He disappeared down the ladder, and you sat alone in the quiet, still cockpit. It felt colder when you were by yourself, and without ever really deciding to move, you found yourself padding silently across the main deck to the galley.

The Mandalorian was facing away from you, and you crept toward him. You stood close enough to his back that you felt the heat radiating off his armor, and you waited for him to turn around. Mirth and mischief bloomed in your chest and you stood up a little straighter—you were _sure_ you were going to get him this time.

He poured water from the kettle into your mug, then stirred in spoonfuls of powder from two different canisters. He added a pinch of behot and two pinches of warm spice with his bare fingers.

“Careful,” he said, turning around to face you, fully aware you were waiting behind him. “It’s hot.”

Your shoulders sagged.

“You cheat,” you whined.

“Nope,” he said. He placed the mug in your hands and you felt it warm you all the way into your chest.

“I didn’t make a single sound! You couldn’t _possibly_ have heard me.”

“Nope,” he said again, tugging his glove back on.

“Then how did you know I was there?” you asked. “Oh yeah, I know how, _you fuckin’ cheat_.”

You brought the mug to your lips and pointedly slurped. It burned like liquid fire, but you kept your face straight. “Seriously, what is it? Some kind of sensor in the helmet?” You waggled an index finger in a squiggle around his visor.

He shook his head.

“I’ll get you one day,” you said, bringing the finger down and poking it into his chestplate.

“You really won’t.”

You took a step back and leaned against the crate of rations that had poisoned you earlier. The Mandalorian had declared just about all the food on the ship too dangerous to be eaten, so he’d set a course for a nearby spaceport where you could resupply. Until then, all he deemed safe enough to eat was food in multiple-serving packages that had already been opened and eaten and not poisoned anyone.

Broth. It was pretty much just the broth.

The rest he wanted to blow out an airlock, but the Razor Crest didn’t have one of those, so you’d gotten him to settle for burning it once you touched down on the planet’s surface. Sorry, starving orphans of Naboo, or wherever.

“When did you want to land?” you asked, a pleasant tingle in your head from the spicy broth. You hadn’t put through the docking request yet, you’d been waiting for his go-ahead.

“Few hours,” the Mandalorian said. “We’re in position, but the sun’s not up for a while yet down there. No point in setting down ’til then.”

You nodded. Made sense—it was safer in space than on the ground. Didn’t cost much extra fuel to just orbit the planet for a while.

“Gonna be nice to stretch my legs,” you said. “Hit the market. Air out the ship. I’m no princess but it’s getting a little heavy on the Boy Stink in here if I’m being honest.”

“You’re staying here,” he said, turning his back to you under the guise of closing the canisters of broth. “With the kid.” As if that was going to make it final. All it did was immediately piss you off. You pushed off from the crate and reached out with your empty hand to grab his arm at the elbow just above his bracer, where just his shirt covered his skin. You tugged to get him to face you.

“Listen here, _bev'ikad,_ ” you said, pulling yourself forward into him with your grip on his arm. He half-growled through his nose, but you pressed on. “I’ve sat merrily on this ship while you refueled, scouted, and fuck-knows-what-else. But after weeks of house arrest and a near-death experience, you are out of your entire goddamn mind if you think you are leaving me in this tin can prison to babysit while you go _pick out my food for me_.”

He opened his mouth to argue—you could tell, because he leaned forward and raised his free hand to gesticulate—and you made an “eh” noise to intercept it.

“‘Keeping things on hand,’” you said. “That’s one of the things you asked for my help with. I am not your _ward_ , I’m your friend, and you may not order me around like a child.”

He seethed in unmoving silence. You released his arm and added quietly, “I will fall asleep if you leave me here.”

“Fine,” he said, then leaned forward and added, “ _if_ you can stay close and follow my lead.”

“Fine,” you agreed. You scowled and brought your mug back to your lips. “You’re lucky you make good _shig_.”

“ _You’re_ lucky I bought that ‘fall asleep’ nonsense,” he retorted, shaking his head. “And you call _me_ a cheater.”


	11. Con Forza

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Let's just play ping-pong with who saves whose life, I guess.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Glossary  
> Haarshun: Mandalorian hard-tack. Think if lembas bread was rolled out really thin and then rolled up before being baked.

“Hey, so, uh… I have a problem,” you said a couple of hours later, once he’d touched the Razor Crest down on the planet. You were standing behind him in the cockpit as he finished shutting down the ship.

He toggled a few more switches and then swiveled his seat to face you as the engines fell silent. The p-word always got his attention.

“Not to criticize, but I don’t suppose you grabbed my shoes when you scooped up my unconscious body and ran for our lives back on Nevarro?” You pointed down at your bare feet and wiggled your toes against the metal floor like you needed to produce evidence.

“You don’t have _shoes_?”

“I do not,” you said cheerfully. You crept a bit closer to him, touching your toes to the tips of his enormous boots. “And I don’t think we wear the same size.”

“You’re just now _noticing_ you don’t have shoes?”

“I— When have I _needed_ shoes before now?” you said. You gestured broadly around and let out something between a scoff and a laugh. “I haven’t left the ship since you brought me onboard weeks ago. Hence my _excitement_ at getting to _leave_ _it_ for a second. So we can keep _emphasizing_ words at _random_ , or we can… I don’t know… go chop down a shoe tree, buddy, what do you say?” You affectionately swatted his deltoid.

He sighed through his nose and stood. “Alright,” he said, clapping a heavy hand on your shoulder and giving it a squeeze. “We’ll go chop down a shoe tree.” Once he was a few steps further away and out of arm’s reach, he added a mumbled “…you maniac.”

The cockpit door hissed open and he climbed down the ladder to the deck below. “Where’s the kid?” he asked as you clambered down after him. The pod sat empty, just outside the armory.

“Boom!” You pivoted your weight onto your back leg dramatically and twisted at the waist. You had an inky blue sash draped across your chest, from your right shoulder to just above your left hip, and in the bottom of the loop, bundled in the fabric, lay the child. You hooked a thumb between the layers of cloth to reveal his sleeping form and triumphantly declared in a stage whisper, “Baby in a bag! The ultimate low-profile way to sneakily schlep your fugitive foundling anywhere and everywhere you need to go.”

He peered down into the folds of muslin and then back up to you face. You felt him squint at you. “How much behot broth have you _drank_?”

“Just what you gave me,” you said with a wave of your hand. “I’m not high, dummy, I’m excited to get off the ship. Stretch my legs! Smell new smells! Punch a dude for being a vulgar asshole! Eat food that probably isn’t poisoned! Who’s with me?!”

“Ten minutes,” he said, opening the cargo doors.

“Ten minutes for what?”

“I gotta go and…chop down a shoe tree,” he gestured down the ramp. “I’ll be right back.”

“I can help,” you said, a tinge of a whine creeping into your voice. “It’s so boring here.”

“People will notice a barefoot girl in the market,” he said. “Especially walking next to a Mandalorian. One weird thing, you can get away with. Two attracts attention. If the kid shows himself, that’s three, which means we’re on the run for a while.”

You nodded. What else could you do—he was right. No sense in courting chaos. You were in high spirits, sure, but you had almost _died_ yesterday; med-packs and behot could only do so much. You were still feeling a little weak, and dodging blaster fire with the baby at your hip did not sound appealing.

The Mandalorian turned to leave the ship, but only got a few steps before you called out to him. He spun around to look at you and you tossed a chunk of beskar at him.

“Can’t go out half-dressed,” you said. “It’s indecent.”

He had stopped wearing one of his pauldrons on the Crest a few weeks ago, you’d noticed, but you didn’t know if you were _supposed_ to notice, so you hadn’t said anything. You couldn’t let him just walk off the ship all sloppy, only wearing one shoulder, though. What would the other dads think?

He tipped his head down once in thanks and clicked the pauldron into place without looking. He turned back on his heel and then he was gone.

Patience being _so_ not your strong suit, you knew you needed to occupy yourself somehow or ten minutes would seem like a week. There wasn’t much you wanted to attempt with a twenty-pound weight dangling off your body, so you decided on putting on a pair of socks and then retying your headscarf. You pleated it carefully over your hairline, tightened it, twisted the tails in opposite directions, and swirled them over your crown.

Once the last bits of fringe were tucked up neatly, you turned your head from side to side in the grimy mirror and wrinkled your nose. Nope—not your style. Too uppity. You reached up to take it down and a deep voice echoed around you.

“Looks nice,” it said, and you wheeled around, finding your blade in your hand and the Mandalorian’s throat at its point. His shoulder rested against the partition that separated the fresher and your small sleeping area. As ever, he did not flinch. You scowled at him, knife still poised, and held eye contact—you assumed, anyway—as you untucked and uncoiled the twin tails of your scarf with your free hand.

“Odd response to a compliment,” he said, gesturing at the knife with his chin and not bothering to conceal the amusement in his voice. “And a gift.”

You returned the vibroblade to the sheath concealed within your pocket and shook your head. “One of these days,” you warned, leaving the rest unsaid as you tucked the ends of your scarf back into their usual configuration. _One of these days, you’re gonna fuck around and get killed._

“Nah,” he said. Once your hands were empty, he passed you a bundle of heavy black leather.

“Maker’s shapely _ass_ ,” you breathed a second later, holding one of the boots up to inspect it. You let the wall hold you up while you slipped your foot into place. The sole was the exact right length and width, and the leather hugged your calf perfectly. You put on the other shoe and groaned in appreciation. “Seriously, how do they fit so well? These are a goddamn _miracle_.”

“Do I need to take the kid and get out of here?” the Mandalorian asked with what you could clearly hear was a smirk. “Leave the three of you alone for a while?”

“Shit, _maybe_ ,” you said, appreciating the other boot in its turn. You brought your focus back to him for a second and wagged a finger and added, “And don’t act like I haven’t walked in on you carefully caressing the curves of your beskar with an oilrag in your hand and lust in your heart.”

He did not reply.

“Exactly,” you said, then brushed some imaginary dust off the tip of your left boot and stood to your full height. “Fine. I’ll be spending the evening with these babies and a bottle of fine Maridunian seedpod oil, but during the daytime, I’ll settle for letting my imagination run wild while I go get ‘em dirty.”

He shook his head as you squeezed past and you fought back a smile. He liked to startle you, and you liked to make him shake his head in incredulity. You patted his chestplate as you moved through the doorway and said, “Be a good boy and maybe I’ll let you watch.”

You walked right down the ramp of the ship without looking back, knowing that he would follow. 

With every step on the planet’s soft surface, the leather of your new boots creaked in protest, and you felt it deep down in your soul. “Fucking _sand_ ,” you grumbled. “Whole wide universe, endless configuration of habitable planets, and I end up stepping off one shitty desert planet and onto another.”

“You didn’t ‘step off’ Nevarro, I carried you,” the Mandalorian said, having caught up to you. “If that helps.”

You turned your head to look at him, noting that he’d chosen to walk on the side where the child was bundled. “I think you know it doesn’t,” you said, returning your focus to the path ahead. “But… thank you. You could have just left me there and your life would have been a lot simpler.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Until I ate poisoned food.”

“Happy to be of service,” you said with a snort.

He turned his head to look at you. “I was never going to leave you there to be captured. We don’t leave people on the battlefield.”

You nodded and kept walking alongside him toward the bazaar in silence, trying to figure out what to say in response. You were hopelessly distracted when a delicious smell wafted to you on the hot breeze, causing you to walk a little taller and faster. “What _is_ that? It smells _amazing_.”

“Happabore mating season,” the Mandalorian said.

You about-faced. “Nope. Me and the kid are going back to the ship. I’ll eat broth forever. Goodbye.”

He grabbed your arm and spun you back around, laughter ringing from the modulator in his helmet. “It’s the spice seller’s table, come on.”

You walked among the stalls, alternately enamored and horrified by the wares. The Mandalorian ushered you quickly past the leathersmith while she called out about his “very fine choice, a perfect fit for your lady-friend! Yes, you picked well! Look, we have a blaster holder to match—” You raised your eyebrows and looked at him as she fell out of earshot. The urge to tease him over the “ _lady-friend_ ” remark was strong, but you’d save it for later.

“Why did she take me for the blaster holder type, do you think?” you said.

“Hmm?”

“She had belts and bracers and cuffs,” you said, gesturing with a thumb back over your shoulder. “But she went straight to ‘blaster holder for your _lady-friend_.’” You tried on the smith’s accent for effect. Apparently you weren’t suppressing the urge to tease him for very long.

“You walk like a fighter,” he said.

“What the hell does _that_ mean?”

“It’s not—“ he started, and then changed direction. “You can tell by looking at someone whether they can handle themselves, right?”

“I mean, I guess,” you said. You gestured at a mammoth of a guy at the stall of a kebab seller. “He’s big but not dangerous, but that guy over there—“ you turned to nod in the other direction, then stopped and swore under your breath.

“What is it?” the Mandalorian asked.

“Pull me into that alley like you can’t keep your hands off of me. Now,” you said, beaming up at him playfully, but your voice leaving no room for question. The contrast between the smile and your tone underlined the urgency, and he obliged without hesitation.

Your companion wrapped an arm around your waist and whisked you down the narrow pathway. You giggled girlishly— _ugh_ —and spun with the motion. He pressed against you, melting you into the stone facade of an unmarked building. “What’s going on?” he asked again, dropping his head into the crook of your neck, shielding your face from the mouth of the alleyway.

“Don’t look yet, but there’s a human, green coat, brown leather,” you breathed. “He’s been looking at us, following a booth or two behind. I thought he was only being a creep, but he just signaled someone else. I didn’t see who.”

You brought your knee up and put your foot flat against the wall, then ran your hands down the Mandalorian’s flank, between the front and back pieces of his cuirass. “Probably just cutpurses, right?” you said.

“Be pretty stupid to try and steal from someone walking next to a Mandalorian,” he said quietly, palm brushing down the thigh of your bent leg. “That kind of stupid is desperate. And desperate is sloppy.”

“That pathway lead anywhere?” you asked, nodding to bend in the alley.

As if in answer, the Mandalorian hoisted you up and turned to move deeper into the lane. You giggled again for show, then wrapped your legs around his waist and your arms around his neck, dipping your head down and peering through your lashes for any sign of your pursuers. By the time you turned down a curve in the alley a few seconds later, you’d seen nothing.

He set you down on the ground and gestured for you to follow him.

“So… Couple questions,” he said.

“Romantic affection grosses people out!” you blurted, feeling your cheeks turn pink. “Watching makes them feel like a perv, so they look away. It’s basically an invisibility shield. Don’t start.”

A moment passed in silence while you followed him down twists in the path. He cleared his throat once.

“Anyway… A couple questions,” he repeated. “One: see anything?”

“No,” you said, glancing over your shoulder. “Helmet picking anything up?”

“Not how the helmet works,” he said, nearing an intersection of paths. “Two: what’s your gut say?”

“That we can probably take ‘em but that I’d rather not try.”

He nodded. “Guess it’s gonna be a couple more days of broth and —“

On an instinct that was becoming all too familiar, you stopped cold and reached out to grab the Mandalorian’s forearm. You yanked him back toward you just as a round of blaster fire sailed down the alleyway at head level. He ducked back, pressing his shoulders against the wall and drawing his blaster.

“ _Haarshun_ ,” he finished. “Fuck. That your guy?”

“Nope,” you said, not bothering to look. You gestured down the other intersecting path, as your original pursuer peeked around a corner. “That is.”

The Mandalorian let out a low growl and a string of blasphemy in Mando’a then moved closer to you, angling his body to shield you and the child from danger.

You turned to look back down the way you’d come and spotted a Nikto whose blaster was raised at you. “One at our rear,” you whispered to your companion in Mando’a. This was not good.

The world came apart, three times at once.

The unseen attacker fired another blaster round at the Mandalorian, this time hitting him just above the knee. He groaned and crumbled to the ground.

Your arms flew out to catch him and time stopped as a bolt came flying in slow-motion at your chest. The bolt was a hands-breadth away from your skin as you looked on in a mixture of horror and wonder, and then your entire existence went white and silent as you stood frozen. Your vision was dazzled by the pure white energy that seemed to emanate from the very air around you, but as your eyes adjusted, you found yourself in the same horrific, timeless prison that you’d been visiting every night in your dreams.

_No. Maker, please, no._

You felt wordless, unformed panic begin to seize the breath in your lungs, and then it vanished as quickly as it rose, leaving you empty for a moment and an eternity. Anger settled down around you in its place, hot and sizzling. You raged at the absolute _bullshit_ of it all, that you would be rendered helpless while some lowlife pieces of shit tore down three lives at once, but then the anger bubbled away and you were once again devoid of emotion for an unknowable time. Anger was eventually replaced by intense fear—fear for the foundling, fear for the Mandalorian, fear for what would happen to them if you remained trapped here, but then the fear, too, was swept away. Everything was just outside your reach, as if beyond some kind of barrier, even your own thoughts.

The bright white emptiness went silent and numb for a single heartbeat that stretched out to a lifetime, and then an echo rose up out of the depths of your past.

_“There is a darkness in all things,” your mother said to you across the years-wide ocean of your memory, “just as there is lightness. Only we can decide which we will let grow stronger, our darkness or our light. I hope that you will always choose to be a light in darkness, sweetling. To use your sense of fairness and loyalty to fight for what you love, rather than against what you hate.”_

Her voice faded out, and you were seven years old and in her lap again, crying about the village boy and his cruelty, crying about your shouting, about your loss of control. She kissed your temple and pressed her palms to your head, and the room was bright white and empty once more.

Your vision was blown out with the pure light for just a moment, and then the present began to come back into focus. The blaster round was all but touching your chest. You reached out and sensed the foundling, so unwaveringly confident of his safety at your side that he was still asleep at your hip through all the chaos. You stretched further and felt the deep honor and obligation the Mandalorian felt for his foundling, and was coming to feel for you. You felt his willingness to die without regret, if it could mean safety for the one who was as his child, and the one who was as his clan.

Peace and calm settled down around you like a cool, fine mist, and time slipped forward by a split second.

The bolt of energy leapt forward and crashed into you, but you felt no impact. Instead, you thrust out both arms, palms out, and you _shouted_ with every bit of breath and feeling and life and love within you.

The three men went flying away from you as if hit by a blast. The sand of the pathway, too, was scattered outward, with you and the Mandalorian at the center of the miniature sandstorm. One of the men blew backward and crashed against the stone facade of a building with a disgusting crack and then landing on the ground with a limp thud. The other two hit the sand more or less simultaneously.

You loosed your vibroblade at the Nikto before you could see if he was going to move. The blade struck true, catching him square in the chest. You turned to the last of your assailants just as the Mandalorian raised his blaster and fired two rounds at him, then fired once into each of the other two men, just to be safe.

The fight went out of you and you fell to your knees, the wind knocked completely out of you.

“Are you hurt?”

You gasped for breath, your lungs not working to pull in the air you so desperately needed.

The Mandalorian crawled across the short distance to you on his hands and knees, then took your face in his hands to look you over. His body went completely still as his appraisal moved downward and he spotted the singed blaster hole in the chest of your shirt and saw you struggling to catch your breath. His hands hovered for a moment over your breastbone, with a barely-perceptible shake.

“Hey, talk to me,” he said. “You’re gonna be okay.” He pressed his hand firmly against your chest, to staunch any bleeding. Your vision started to grow dim as your body fought to remember how to work your lungs.

You took a ragged inhale, finally, then hissed in pain while the dark spots faded from your sight. “You’re jabbing my necklace… into my sternum,” you murmured between gasps, voice hoarse.

“You can yell at me about it later,” he said. “We’ve gotta get you back to the ship, we’ve got to—“

“Shh,” you said, bringing one hand up to rest on the face of his helmet and placing the other hand overtop of his on your chest. You pressed firmly just to check, and then pulled his hand away. There was a hole in your shirt, but not your skin. You were fine. Your chest hurt and your tits were going to be bruised to hell and back, but other than that, you were fine. “Look,” you said, and pulled the neck of your shirt down to reveal your intact chest. “It hit my necklace.”

You showed him the only heirloom you had left: a black crystal embedded in a blocky setting of silver metal with ornate designs carved into it.

“Got me in the beskar,” you said with what would maybe be a laugh later when you were capable of experiencing mirth again. “Come on, we gotta go.”

You wrestled yourself up to standing, and then held out both hands to the Mandalorian. He reached for the wall for support and you grabbed him above the elbow on the other side and hauled him to his feet. Once you were sure he was steady, you left him to get his bearings for a moment and extracted your knife from the fallen Nikto and then returned to your companion. You ducked under his arm on the side with the wounded leg and positioned the draped fabric that cradled the child between the two of you, then peeked inside to find the foundling, bright-eyed, wide awake, and seemingly unharmed. You and the Mandalorian blew out a breath of relief in near-unison as the kid perked his ears at the two of you, and then made your way back down the alley the way you’d come.

“Find a healer here or get you back to the ship?” you asked. You didn’t know this planet at all—hell, you didn’t even remember which planet this _was_ —and so you had no idea what else to expect.

“Back to the ship,” he said, leaning heavily on you but trying not to. “I’ll be fine and we don’t know who those people were or if they’ve got allies.”

You wanted to scoff at his “I’ll be fine,” but couldn’t bring yourself to do it, after everything you’d been through. Everything you felt. Everything you sensed. Everything you knew.

“Don’t think we won’t be talking about what happened back there,” he said quietly in Mando’a.

“When we’re back on the ship,” you replied with a nod. “But it sounds crazy.”

“Everything sounds crazy lately,” he said.

“Ain’t that the fuckin’ truth.”

By the time you reached the hangar and climbed the ramp leading up into the Razor Crest a few minutes later, he was barely limping. You walked him into the cargo bay and gestured for him to sit on one of the crates of to-be-burned rations. You tossed a handful of coins at the hangar attendant—who didn’t seem concerned in the least that your companion’s pant leg was soaked in blood—then closed up the ship and prepared to depart whatever the sand-covered shithole of a planet was called.

You crouched down before the Mandalorian to look at the wound on his leg, but he waved you away. “Later,” he said. “We’re safer off the surface. Take us up. You know how.”

You looked at him for a moment then nodded and turned to the little black cradle sitting by the armory. You reached into the bundle of cloth at your hip and extracted the kid—already fast asleep again—then gently tucked him into his blankets and closed the pod.

Somewhat shakily, you climbed the ladder to the cockpit. The whiz of the doors sliding open made you jump, even though you’d heard it so often before. You sat in the pilot’s seat and began the process of getting the ship into the sky. Once you were free from the planet’s gravity and headed in the general direction of Anywhere But There, you returned to the Mandalorian in the cargo bay.

You grabbed a handful of medical supplies, then knelt down to finally take a look at the blaster wound. You tugged at the tear in the fabric of his pants, trying to get a better look.

“I think the kid took care of the worst of it,” he said.

“Yeah,” you agreed. “I thought he might’ve. He was pretty zonked when we got back to the ship. Looks like there’s a little left for me, though.” You worked in silence for a few minutes, pretty sure that you weren’t alone in not knowing what the hell to say.

Or, rather, there was a lot to say, you just didn’t know what to say first and what to skip over entirely. Instead, you swabbed at the cut on the Mandalorian’s leg with cleanser and a numbing agent. When it kept oozing blood, you set to work with the laser cauterizer to seal the wound the rest of the way.

You startled when the Mandalorian spoke first.

“They didn’t want me,” he said.

“What do you mean?” you asked, pausing your work with one hand prying open the tear in his pant leg and the other holding the cauterizer.

“They shot me in the leg—not the chest, not the head. They wanted me out of the way and unable to follow, but didn’t care to fight me enough to get a kill shot on me. They wanted you, or they wanted the kid. I wasn’t the target. And they didn’t even bother to try and kill me to get to you.” His voice was so small at first that it made you ache, but his words grew in intensity until he practically growled out his last sentence. He sounded almost feral, wild with fury he didn’t have an outlet for.

“That would have been a mistake on their part,” you said with a shake of your head. “If they’d succeeded in getting the kid. You wouldn’t rest until you got him back.”

The Mandalorian put his hand overtop of yours where it rested on his leg. “Either of you,” he said. “I would fight to get either of you back.” You nodded. Of course you did. You knew it was true. You’d seen it in him, back on the planet.

“I know,” you said. You swallowed hard, and your voice shook, but you kept going. “I know you would, Din Djarin.”

You’d seen _a lot of things_ back on the planet.


	12. Tremolando

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The inevitable Drink & Talk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Glossary  
> narcolethe: strong mandallian liquor. not many people's first choice, but it'll get you drunk pretty quick  
> k'oyaci: cheers (lit. "stay alive" or "live!")

“What did you say?” the Mandalorian asked. His hand flinched, as if he wanted to pull away, but he froze it in place.

You flopped from a squatting position into a sitting one, landing on the floor with a thump and letting your hand slide from his leg. You were pretty much done cauterizing the wound there anyway. You placed the instrument back in its case with a click.

“First things first,” you said, your voice still hoarse from your little display back on the planet. “Kid’ll be out for a bit. I could use a drink.”

You groaned as you wrestled your weary body to standing.   
  
“Come on,” you said, extending a hand to the Mandalorian. “You’re gonna want one too.”

“ _The ‘first thing’ that’s first_ ,” he said firmly, grabbing your offered hand by the wrist to hold you in place, rather than to let you help him up, “is where you came up with that name.”

You took in a long, slow breath and blew it out. “You’re really gonna wish you’d let me get you a drink first,” you said with a resigned shake of your head. You leaned against the wall of the cargo bay, and he let your hand slip from his grasp.

“I saw it— …ugh,” you started hesitantly and then cut off, knowing he was going to react poorly to what came next. You brought your hands to your face and rubbed your eyes hard enough to make them bleary, then dragged your palms down your cheeks and to your jawline, tipping your head up to look at the ceiling. “Fuck. I saw it in your head. Or, like, from your head,” you blurted, as though getting the words out quickly would lessen their impact.

He scoffed through his nose. “You, what, _read my mind_?” The disbelief in his voice was not subtle.

“No, your… Maker’s sake, I sound ridiculous. Your mind… read itself to me.”

He shook his head and splayed his hands in a _What the fuck does that mean?_ gesture.

“To say I read your mind makes it sound like I went looking,” you said, feeling that this was an important distinction to make. “I didn’t _look_ for shit. It was just there.”

“How?” he asked, more a demand than a question.

You shook your head and shrugged, but knew it wasn’t going to be a satisfactory answer. If the roles were reversed, you knew you wouldn’t take a shrug for an answer either.

“When they shot you, and then shot at me, it was like time stopped,” you said. “Not in the normal way that time stands still during a fight. I mean, like, I noticed everything, saw the blaster bolt just suspended in the air in front of me, had time to think thoughts— _stopped_. And the next thing I knew, I was in that white room from my dream, the one I told you about.”

You turned and pointed to the galley. “I’m getting a drink.”

You walked over to the hodgepodge of wall-mounted cupboards that passed for the ship’s kitchen and started rummaging around, not bothering to look back. It was less about the alcohol and more just needing time to choose your words. It wasn’t like you knew what was going on, either.

Clanking of heavy boots against the floor grates told you the Mandalorian rose to follow you, but his slow movement told you it wasn’t in anger. He walked behind you and you heard a door slide open. You turned to see him opening a cabinet in your sleeping quarters, from which he produced a glass bottle of a thick, dark liquid.

You had been right this morning when you wondered if it was his bed you were sleeping in.

“Why didn’t you say something?” you asked, gesturing over to the cot. Shame welled up in your chest. “I didn’t want to take over your space—I’m more than capable of sleeping on the floor.”

“So am I,” he said, handing you the bottle.

“Yeah, but, it’s _your_ bed,” you said. You strained to pry the cork from the bottle, grunting while you twisted it futilely in your grasp. “You should sleep in your bed.”

The Mandalorian held his hand out and you handed him the bottle so he could try.

“Maybe we can share it,” you said.

He froze as the cork popped out of the bottle.

_Oh, for fuck’s sake._

“Like take turns!” you exclaimed, voice gone higher and even more hoarse from the strain. You put your hands up in front of you, palms out. Heat flared to your face and down your neck. “Not like— I don’t— I mean, I can watch over things with the kid and cockpit while you sleep in your bed instead of on the poky-ass floor grates.”

 _Fucking kill me,_ you said to yourself.

You would rather go back to the white prison room than stand here in this awkward bullshit, so you took the bottle from the Mandalorian’s hands and brought it to your lips.

You swallowed a large mouthful and reflexively grimaced when the entire length of your esophagus caught fire an instant later. You coughed and then sucked in a ragged breath. The fumes of what must’ve been pure fucking ethanol flew down your throat into your lungs, bringing the burning sensation with them and sucking out all your inhaled air. You sputtered, fighting down a heave, and when your mouth flooded with saliva, you thought really hard about spitting on the floor, but managed to swallow it down.

“ _Where the hell did you get that,_ the ship’s fuel tank?” you groaned, even more hoarse than before. Your stomach felt like it was full of hot coals.

“It’s Narcolethe,” he said by way of explanation, amusement plain in his voice.

“It tastes like—“ your head began to swim rather pleasantly. “Oh… _Oh_ , nevermind, I get it now.”

“There it is,” he said. “ _K’oyacyi_.”

“Thank fuck,” you said, making a _cheers_ gesture with the bottle, then cradling it to your chest. Warmth had settled there and begun to spread up to your face. “There’s nowhere to sit down here, I’m going up“ —you waved your hand at the ceiling— “there.”

“You could just sit on the bed,” he said, teasing you.

“Zip it. You want to hear the rest of the story or no?”

You clomped up the ladder gracelessly, then flopped into the jump seat without use of your knees. The Mandalorian followed, the foundling’s pod in tow, and the cockpit doors swished closed.

“So they shot me,” your companion said. “And then time stopped and you were back in your dream.”

“Mmm, not in the dream,” you said. You shook your head, causing it to swim a little. “Least, I don’t think so. It was… in me.”

“Okay,” he said, warily.

“I know, I know. Told you it was nuts.” You took another, much less-ambitious swig, then offered him the bottle with a raised brow and turned around in the seat pointedly. With your back to the Mandalorian, you pressed on. “I just, I can’t describe it. I was there for… lifetimes, and at the same time, it was a half a heartbeat. It was like anytime I let myself feel something, the clock started over?”

“On what?” he asked.

“Hmm?”

“You said ‘the clock started over,’” he said, his voice still modulated.

“Rude to let me drink alone,” you said. “Poor hospitality. Storytime resumes when we’re on even footing.”

“I’d have to drink half the bottle,” he said, huffing a short breath out of his nose. “You’re more of a lightweight than I thought you’d be.”

“That shit’s just…different.” You waved your hand in a beckoning gesture over your shoulder. “Go on, then.”

“If you turn around—“

“I know,” you said, voice quiet. “I wouldn’t. I can step out of the cockpit and you can lock the door if you w—”

The sound of bubbling from the bottle of Narcolethe quieted you. Knowing it was just behind your shoulder, you wondered for the first time what his face looked like. It had never occurred to you to wonder before. Sure, there had been times when you were curious about his facial expression—most often whether he was smiling or scowling when you made a joke—but you hadn’t really considered what features made up the face of your Mandalorian. Strong chin, or weak? Gaunt cheekbones or boyishly rounded cheeks? Were his eyes soft and wide or did he default to an appraising glare?

You resumed in a voice barely above a whisper. “It was like the clock started over on…a prison sentence. It… Not ‘prison,’ like punishment, but it… I don’t know. It felt… corrective. I was angry they attacked us, so I emptied out and the clock started over. Then fear would rise up, and the clock would start over once I was empty. It just… every time. If I stayed numb, the time just stretched out and nothing happened.”

“Until?” came his voice, sounding like it always did. You didn’t realize you’d been hoping to hear his natural voice again, but a pang of disappointment flared for an instant once you knew his helmet was back on. He tapped your elbow gently with the bottle and you turned around to take it, looking at his visor.

“My mother. I remembered something that she said, only…” you shook your head and looked down at the bottle. “It was like she was speaking in my ear, it wasn’t like a memory of her voice.”

“What did she say?”

“That I should choose to feed the light in myself, rather than the darkness. Fight for things I love, not against things I hate.” You made a halfheartedly-dismissive wave with the bottle and said, “Just… mom stuff.”

“And then you were free?” he said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms over his chest, splaying his legs wide in a relaxed posture.

You nodded, but then something came back to you. “Wait. No.” You looked up and to the side, squinting beyond the viewscreen into the stars, remembering the final moments before the present had come back to you. “No, I… I flashed to somewhere else for a second first. Instead of just hearing her voice, I was with her, back in a moment in the past. My head was in her lap and she was comforting me. I had shouted at a kid in the village for—“

 _Shouted_.

Words from a memory floated up around you and you sat up bolt-straight in your chair. _“I couldn’t help it, Mama. I shouted at him—I know I shouldn’t shout, I’m sorry—but I didn’t know it would be so LOUD. I didn’t know my voice could go that loud.”_

Your mind became a white void and a fragment of the past flashed to the surface. Your tiny, balled-up fists in the periphery of your vision. A bellow that rumbled up from the very core of you. The village boy’s smug face gone slack, eyes wide with shock as he was pushed back. The wave of fallen cherry blossoms that flew up around you in the gust and settled down again like snowfall. Settled on the cobblestone path, settled in your hair, settled on the unmoving village boy.

Your hands flew to your mouth and you gasped, looking back to the Mandalorian.

“It’s happened before,” you breathed. “I’ve done it before.”

His posture tensed just a fraction, but he said nothing.

“I shouted at the village kid. _Shouted_. Like I did earlier. And he went flying. That’s what my mother was comforting me over. I’ve told you this story, actually,” you said, leaning forward to point at the Mandalorian and set the bottle down on the floor of the cockpit. “He was being a dick about my mom and we fought and I yelled and I got a nosebleed and a headache. Then, at home, my mom pulled me into her lap and kissed my head and pressed her hands to my temples and everything went warm and white and the pain went away.”

Something stuck out in your mind.

“Everything went white,” you repeated.

“What did you feel?” the Mandalorian asked, stirring you from your reverie.

“Hmm?” You fidgeted in your chair and brought your feet up into the seat, curling your body over your knees.

“In that last memory. Laying there with your head in your mother’s lap. What did you feel? Your“—he gestured vaguely—“ _emotions_ , in that moment.”

You brought the memory back to mind and turned it over in your hand like a pebble, inspecting it.

“Safe. Loved.” Tears welled up in your eyes and spilled down your cheeks. Your voice cracked on the last word. “Forgiven.”

“And the clock didn’t start over.”

You shook your head.

“But it did when you were angry and afraid.”

“It was like something unlocked,” you said. “That’s why I keep saying it was like a jail cell. The door opened finally and I came back to the present.”

You leaned to the side to pick the bottle of Narcolethe back up off the floor and took a swig.

“That’s when I saw you.” You held the bottle to your chest with both hands around its neck and your chin on its mouth. “Fallen to the ground, but still so determined. Some part of you still a scared foundling, reaching out for his parents, reaching out for rescue by Death Watch, reaching out for safety, for family, for connection. But you don’t resent it. You cradle that part of you close. It’s why you’re so bonded to the kid.” You waved the bottle over to the little black pod where the Mandalorian’s foundling was still fast asleep.

The Mandalorian leaned forward toward you, clasping his hands together between his knees and resting his elbows on his thighs.

“You make your own safety now, but not just for yourself,” you said. You matched his lean and reached out to press a hand to his hidden cheek. “You make safety for the little one, for those krill farmers on that remote planet, on Nevarro… You make safety for me.”

He placed a gloved hand over yours, holding it to the face of his helmet.

“When you say you ‘saw’ me—” he whispered. The tremor in his voice broke your heart because you knew the complex emotion it conveyed.

You stared at his visor for several seconds, then shook your head. “I saw… your vision of yourself as a child. Before. During the battle that took your parents and led to you becoming Mandalorian.” You drew in a deep breath and let it fall from your lungs. “I know that you... I saw your ambivalence about the Way. The creed. I saw how much you want to be seen. I saw you take that risk, back with the krill farmers. Taking off your helmet to eat, standing in the window where anyone might look up and see you. Letting the Maker decide.”

He blew out a breath and reached out to take the bottle of alcohol from you. You let your fingertips slip from between his hand and the metal covering his face. He reached a hand up to grasp the bottom of his helmet, then paused. You let your eyes drop from his visor to his chest, then turned away. You got the distinct impression that if you stayed facing him, he might take his helmet off anyway. His heart ached to be seen, but his soul was Mandalorian. That war would have a victor eventually, but you didn’t want to be caught in the crossfire. Not passively. Not on a whim.

A full minute later, just as you were about to speak, you heard soft percolations from the bottle of Narcolethe at your back.

You felt a sudden wave of longing for his voice. His true voice. Your mind raced for something to say that might spur him to speak, and after your brain failed to deliver any prompt that wasn’t a blatant and flimsy excuse to hear his voice, you settled on honesty.

“Will you talk to me?” you asked. “I haven’t heard your voice except when you sang.”

Silence settled into the air around you and stretched out for several seconds. You felt warmth creep into your face and opened your mouth to apologize just as he spoke.

“What do you want me to say?” the Mandalorian asked, his voice clear and clean and warm. Tears sprang to your eyes, and you weren’t sure why. The moment felt heavy with...something.

“Anything,” you said quietly. “Tell me... which planets have the best sunrises. Or the best... dream you’ve ever had, or how your favorite food tastes. You can recite Huttese poetry for all I care.”

Silence returned to the control room for a few heartbeats and your ears strained in anticipation.

“The only Huttese that’s coming to mind is _tooska chai mani_ ,” he said, dropping his voice down to bark out the harsh sounds of the language. “Which I guess has a little poetry to it.”

“What does it mean?”

“‘Your mother let a Tusken fuck her.’”

You laughed so unexpectedly that it sputtered out of your lips and just kept going, wheezing out of you and making you breathless. “ _Poetry_ ,” you said, voice high, when you gained your composure, then dissolved into laughter again.

Just as the second round of your laughter erupted from you, you heard the Mandalorian laugh, right behind you. It was only a single, soft _heh_ , but it was even better than hearing his voice.

“ _Uj’alayi_ ,” he said, when your laughter faded.

“Hmm?” you hummed.

“My favorite food. Or, at least, the one I feel most ... fond of.”

“Go on,” you said in Mando’a, hoping he’d follow your lead. “Tell me about _uj’alayi_.”

“For years I thought I hated it,” he said, and you smiled to yourself when you heard him speak in his adopted tongue. When he spoke Mando’a, his voice was even more warm and…the only word you could think of to describe it was… _foresty_. Old trees and deep woods and rich soil. It struck you as odd that such an earthy, warm sound would be hiding under all that cold metal. You brought your attention back to his voice as he continued. “It always had these big pieces of nuts that ruined the texture. But the cake itself... _mmh_. When I was a kid, I used to disassemble it, patiently picking out the nuts one by one and eating them, then gathering the crumbs into a pile. I’d spend all this time separating out the cake bits then smushing them back into a ball. There was no savoring it at that point—in the blink of an eye I’d gobble the whole thing down.”

Hearing him speak Mando’a with his own voice made your chest tight. You had a clear image in your head of a young Din hunched over his dessert like a surgeon at work.

“The adults all thought I liked the nuts,” he continued, “because I went straight for them and picked them out so carefully. I got nuts for a gift on more than one birthday.”

He paused for a beat or two, then asked, “Don’t you know this already? I figured you saw everything?”

You shook your head. “Mostly stuff on the surface, I think. Things you have strong or recent ties to. It was more of an...impression, for the most part. I didn’t get a lot of clear thoughts or, like, how _uj_ cake tastes to you.”

“Have you had it?” he asked.

“Hm-mm,” you murmured. “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t think I’ve ever eaten any.”

“Oh, man,” he sighed dreamily. “It’s sweet and spicy and dense and so, so sticky. The good stuff practically drips syrup down your hand when you eat it. We gotta get you some _uj’alayi_.”

“I’d like that,” you said.

The cockpit grew quiet for another stretch of seconds, and you heard movement behind you. You felt a hand wrap around your upper arm and pull you to turn around. Reflexively, you covered your eyes and closed them.

His hand released your arm and moved down to your wrist, tugging your hand from your face. You let him, but held your eyes closed.

“You’re ridiculous,” the Mandalorian said fondly, his voice once again augmented by electronics. “I can’t just talk to your back all night.”

“I don’t see why not,” you said, wrestling your eyes open. You hadn’t realized how tired you were until you’d closed them. You gestured to his helmet and added, “I talk to that all the time.”

“And yet, when you thought I was going to take it off, you looked away.” His voice was playful, but you felt like maybe the words were honest, somewhere deep down.

You yawned, then slid from your seat and down onto the floor, bringing your knees up to your chest. You craned your neck to look at him and shared a truth you thought some part of him might need to hear.

“It’s not that I didn’t want to see your face. It’s that I know what it _means_ to see your face, and someday—maybe not today, maybe not for a while, but _someday_ —you would lay your head down to sleep, Din Djarin, no longer Mandalorian, and you would hate me for what I cost you.” You looked down at your feet and said, “I couldn’t live with that. Not for some… capricious impulse.

“When you let someone see you, if you _choose_ to let someone see you, it shouldn’t be off the cuff. It shouldn’t be a game of chicken—‘ _Who will flinch first?_ ’—or letting the Maker decide. Your identity is worth more than that. Your _integrity_ is worth more than that. Save your face for someone you make your family, and you get to keep all of it. Or leave the creed behind if you think that’s the right call. But _make the call_. Don’t do it lightly, and don’t try and trick the universe into making the decision for you.”

The control room hummed and blinked around you as the seconds stretched on, and you worried you’d pissed him off. But it was true, and while you’d be sad to know if you hurt his feelings, you weren’t sorry you said any of it.

“How long?” he said, so quiet you weren’t sure he’d spoken at all.

“Hmm?”

“How long,” he repeated, “until ‘ _mister mean robot mode_ ’ is all that’s left?”

Emotion knit your brows together for a flicker of a moment. You looked at your fingers and blinked to clear your eyes. Self-reproach glowed red-hot in your core at hearing your thoughtless words coming from his mouth. You said them lightheartedly, but he returned them with such… despair. You shook your head and looked back up to the Mandalorian.

“Up to you,” you said simply. “But...there’s a difference between being seen and being _known,_ Din. It’s the being known that keeps us from growing cold.” You fidgeted on the floor and straightened out your legs. You waved a hand dismissively as you added, “‘Sides, the helmet won’t be what decides it. There’s lots of mean robot folks out there who _don’t_ cover their faces. It’s a decision. A surrender.”

Again, your mingled breaths and the ship’s hum settled around you in near-silent ambience. A few minutes passed in stillness while you both faded into your own thoughts, swam around, and resurfaced.

Finally, he moved. He leaned forward, reached out an arm, and offered you the bottle of Narcolethe. You looked at it for a handful of seconds, and then shook your head as another yawn spilled out of you.

“If I drink any more, I won’t remember this in the morning,” you said.

He looked down at the bottle for a long moment, as if considering whether he wanted to remember or forget come tomorrow. He set the bottle down on the floor of the cockpit and turned to look at you.

“So,” he spoke at last, “if you read me, back on the planet, does that mean you read the kid? Do you know where his people are or what his”—he held up a hand with his thumb and first two fingers extended—“hand thing is about?”

You smiled at his gesture, but shook your head. “I don’t think he knows. But he was also asleep, so maybe that’s it.”

As if on cue, the foundling began to stir in his cradle, making tiny distressed noises and creasing his fuzzy brow in his sleep. The Mandalorian scooped him up and pressed him to his chest, quieting him almost immediately.

He spun his chair around to the control panel of the ship, looked out over the vast, star-studded emptiness, and said, “Well, I guess we still need food. Let’s try… Lokori.”

After a few moments of his tinkering at the console, the ship fell into hyperspace, and everything went deathly quiet. You could hear your own breathing, and the Mandalorian’s, and the child’s. That familiar smell of electricity and dust sparked up around you and the Razor Crest hummed its quietest efforts.

“What’s on Lokori?” you asked.

“Don’t know much about it,” he said. “Navcomp says two moons, temperate climate, decent-sized capital city.”

“Hmm,” you said sleepily. “I hope it’s not a desert planet.”

You dozed off for a bit, then snapped awake when you realized you were sleeping.

Your companion’s back was still facing you. He held the sleeping foundling, his tiny green head resting on the Mandalorian’s left shoulder, and you suddenly realized why he’d stopped wearing one of his pauldrons on the ship. Quite without your say-so, your heart squeezed in your chest.

“Why not just take them both off?” you asked drowsily, unable to keep the smile from your tired eyes.

Without turning away from the console, he tapped the raised shape on his right pauldron. It was dim in the cockpit, lit by just the distant stars beyond the viewscreen and the instrument lights within, so you leaned forward to get a closer look. You’d seen his armor a thousand times, but never really looked at it.

You curled your fingers lightly around his upper arm and stroked the symbol with your thumb.

The beskar sang to you of its many lives. It had been armor—so much armor—and it had been blades, it had even been part of a starship. And now, it was a signet. A clan.

“It’s proud,” you whispered.

“Hmm?” He turned to look at you.

“The beskar,” you said. “The mudhorn. It’s _so_ proud. Of you. The kid. Its clan.”


	13. Brioso

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Supply run, second attempt.

Dreams. More damnable dreams, but different. You’d be grateful that at least you weren’t stuck in an eternal void this time, but this one might’ve actually been worse.

You saw a pile of helmets and armor in a dimly-lit passageway. The beskar’s familiar song took on a dissonant chord and you couldn’t make out the meaning.

A woman’s voice echoed out across the galaxy of your unconscious mind, and whispered of ruin.

" _They will die a death that will last millennia, until all that remains is their code, their history, and in the end, the shell of their armor upon the shell of a man, too easily slain by Jedi._ "

As the sound faded, bright light flared, replacing the darkness and dazzling your vision. You saw the shape of a man walking toward you across a sun-scorched landscape, carrying some kind of stick. Wavy lines of heat refraction obscured his gait, his shape, any identifying traits. 

Heat hummed across your skin, behind your eyes, into your lungs, and burrowed into you. Blazing sunlight reflected off the man’s helmet as he climbed over rocks, crested small hills, and wove between obstacles, but no matter how long the scene stretched on, he never grew any closer or clearer.

He walked through the daylight until darkness fell across the moonless sky and he faded from view. The night was nearly as hot as the day, with residual warmth creeping up around you from the searing sand. You realized with an alarming… _lack of alarm_ that it wasn’t that the heat was rising up your skin, but rather, you were sinking into the sand. It wrapped itself around your chest with the gentle, comforting squeeze of a lover, slithered into your mouth like a song, and filled you up until blackness drew itself around you and life wilted and withered in the heart of you. Nothing remained but, finally, to rest.

The darkness that cradled you faded further and further away, settling deeper into your mind as reality grew fuzzier and more distant. It was like fading into a deep, warm bath, leaving all concerns and sensations and thoughts on the surface where they couldn’t reach you. Except it was hot and dry and _wrong_.

It was terrifying bliss.

And then, just on the verge of nothingness, you began to rise again, ever so slowly, leaving the weight of your dream at the bottom of the scorched, sandy abyss.

———————————————

“Son of _every bitch in the galaxy,_ ” you groaned as you breached the surface of consciousness, your skin burning with heat, your mouth a desert. Your voice was still gravelly from shouting the day before and it took a couple tries to clear your throat so you could continue swearing. “Inner rim, outer rim, all the rims. Every single one. All the sons.”

“Refreshed?” the Mandalorian asked as you untangled yourself from the knot you’d slept in, curled in the jump seat of the cockpit.

“Maker’s hairy ta—“

“Sounds like a ‘no,’” he interrupted your sacrilege casually, “which is surprising, because you’ve been drooling and sleep-talking for”—he tapped the ship’s clock—“ten hours.”

“I do _not_ talk in my sleep,” you said with a wave of your hand. The wet spot on your sleeve made arguing the other point a little less of a sure bet.

“And snoring,” he added, still facing away from you. He pointed to the little black pod. “Scared the kid. He had a bad experience with a loth cat once and you sounded just like one, with a head cold."

“No. And _ow_ ,” you whined. “I don’t know what hurts more, the crick in my neck or the ache in my tits.”

You pulled open the neck of your shirt to peer down your front, and found a blue-black, blobbish copy of the shape of your pendant stamped on your chest. You gingerly touched the splotch and hissed when your fingers made contact with the puffy, hot, bruised skin.

“You’re going to think I’m exaggerating,” you said, “but I really think that blaster round might’ve broken my sternum.”

He muttered under his breath and turned around in his seat. “Shit. I forgot about that.”

“That makes exactly one of us,” you said, lifting one leg to wiggle it and then the other, shaking out the stiffness from sleep. “But there’s not much you could do about it; we’re out of bacta. We were gonna resupply, remember? Bacta is just one of many things we’re out of, including _all foodstuffs_.”

“We’re out of bacta?” he asked.

You raised your eyebrows. “Yeah, ‘cause someone keeps going out on ‘ _scouting missions_ ’ and ‘ _supply runs_ ’ and coming back bloodied. And empty-handed.”

“It’s a dangerous galaxy.” He spun away again, returning his attention to the viewscreen.

“It is with you in it,” you said, shaking your head and smiling at his back.

The Mandalorian sat the ship down in a grassy area on the edge of a forest, with the capital city visible in the near distance. Once he finished powering down the engines and the Razor Crest was silent except for the pings of cooling metal, you hopped from your seat and beelined for the ladder to go down to the cargo bay. Well... like a really slow bee. One that knew a lot of blasphemy.

“FINALLY,” you breathed. “I can _finally_ take off these boots.”

“I thought you liked them,” he called after you.

“They’re my soul mates—“ you chuckled at your pun and said, “Get it? SOLE mates?” and then when he didn’t reply, you continued, ”—but that’s not the issue.” You heard his feet on the steps and pressed the button to open the cargo hatch to lower the ramp, then fidgeted around as it descended. “The issue is that if I don’t get these boots off immediately, I’m going to fucking die.”

He walked up next to you, trailed by the hovering black pod, and watched as you sat down on the edge of the hatch and let your feet dangle over the grass the ship was resting in. You wrestled one boot off, raised your middle finger to it, and then turned to your companion.

You bore the shoe aloft in presentation, then leveled a blank stare at the Mandalorian as you upended it, spilling a shower of sand onto the ground below. You held up a single finger at him and then shook the shoe one time, causing another small sprinkle of grains to fall out.

“‘Fucking sand?’” he asked, predicting your sentiments exactly.

“Fucking. _Sand_.” You shook your head in disgust as you dumped out the other boot. “Look at this nonsense. How did that much sand even end up in there? You gotta watch yourself or that shit gets _everywhere_. Ruins everything it touches. Maker, do we hate sand.”

You swatted your feet to brush off the tiny, damnable grains from your skin and then stuck your hand in the shaft to scoop out any lingering bits before putting the boots back on.

 _So much better_. You hummed a sigh of contentment and stood to face your companion.

“Okay, boss, where to?” you asked. You raised an arm over your head without thinking, moving to sling the foundling’s fabric carrier over one shoulder and across your chest. A hiss burst through your teeth when pain seared into your torso.

The Mandalorian tipped his chin down at you with what you could just _tell_ was a raised brow and a disapproving look.

“Don’t give me that face,” you said.

“What _face_?” He gestured up and down at his helmet.

“You’re not leaving me here. _I’m fine_.”

“You are, at best, a shit magnet,” he said, “and you _might be_ actively cursed.”

“Not a nice thing to say,” you monotoned.

“You’ve almost died seven times since I’ve met you.”

“I—“ You paused to count in your head. “Like, _four at the most!_ And I’ve saved your ass at least that many times.”

“You’re a liability. I could put you on the ground with one finger right now,” the Mandalorian said, bringing his hand up so the tip of his index finger hovered over your breastbone.

You glared defiantly down his visor and took a step forward, closing the space between you. He held his ground, and his fingertip pressed firmly into your skin. You clenched your jaw but didn’t flinch as a flare of pain gnawed through your chest. Both of you stood there, unwilling to lose this dumbshit standoff—you _knew_ it was a dumbshit standoff, obviously, and so did he—while also struggling to remember what you were even standing off over in the first place.

You were firmly but gently pushed backward from the core. At first, you thought the Mandalorian had pressed a hand to your stomach and given you a nudge, but as you looked down to see what his hand was doing—ready to be even more pissed off and possibly to slap his shitty little mitt away—he stepped back and looked down at the same time, his body language equally confused. It was like a bubble was growing between you, occupying the ground you’d been holding against each other just a second before.

When you were separated by a couple of steps, standing on opposite sides of the ship’s hatch, the pressure eased, and you stopped moving. From your right, a tiny murmur caught your attention and you turned your head to see the child peering out from his pod, hand held aloft in a familiar three-fingered salute.

You looked back at the Mandalorian just as he looked at you, and you both splayed your hands and shrugged in unison.

“Truce?” you asked. You turned to walk down the ramp, not waiting for an answer. “C’mon, my tits hurt and I’m starving.”

You got to the end of the ramp and turned around to face him. You held out the sling of fabric to him and asked, “So what’s it gonna be? You gonna holster that little fella, or is the pod coming along?”

“Pod’s blaster-proof, more or less,” he said, walking toward you, footfalls thudding down the ramp. The cradle hovered along behind him, and you noticed that sometime in the last twenty seconds, the tiny green magician had fallen asleep.

“Seems to take a lot out of him,” you said, gesturing at the kid.

The Mandalorian stopped next to you when his feet reached the grass. He grasped the edge of the bassinet with one gloved hand and nodded as he gazed in at his foundling. “He always jumps in to help anyway,” he said, with what sounded quite a bit like pride in his voice.

An hour or so later, after you’d gotten a meal, some bacta, and had your say in the rations, everyone seemed a bit less on-edge. The Mandalorian was visibly less high-strung once you’d smeared some of the ridiculously overpriced, cloyingly sweet-scented healing goop on your chest. The overprotective lug even briefly allowed you out of his sight to browse in the marketplace for a few minutes while he went off in search of what you guessed was most likely information or maybe weaponry.

You wandered along, browsing the wares between the merchants’ tables, enjoying the first real leisure you’d had in weeks. You rubbed beautiful fabrics between your hands, skimmed your palms along a sun-warmed metal counter stacked high with salvaged parts, breathed deeply near a spice-seller, and licked your fingers as you nibbled on sweets you’d bought from a portly old Snivvian.

You were humming an improvised tune and scanning the bazaar for points of interest when a hand clapped down hard on your shoulder. Without a sound, you reached up with the opposite arm and grabbed the unseen hand, noting that the thumb was next to your neck. You pinned their hand down with yours, raised your elbow and shoulder on the arm they’d grabbed, then spun away from them on the spot, extending their arm and locking it in place, which bent them forward at the waist in the process. To finish the movement, you straightened your arm and seized them by the back of the neck.

A shriek erupted from them as you executed the maneuver, which took all of maybe a second and a half, from shoulder-touching start to squealing finish. They held their free hand aloft in surrender, babbling frantically in a language you didn’t understand.

“Who are you!” you demanded. “What do you want?”

“Directions to Helical Hypercom’s headquarters,” a familiar, electronic voice said lazily. Your head snapped up and you met the gaze of the Mandalorian. He stood at ease, resting one shoulder against the open mouth of an alleyway with a stack of parcels under one arm and a bottle in the hand of the other. He pointed left with the bottle and rattled off a mouthful of the same language as your would-be assailant.

After a second of silence, he gestured at you with the bottle and said, “You have to let go now.”

“Oh,” you said, releasing your grasp and putting both hands up in a yielding posture while you took a step back. They scampered off in the direction the Mandalorian had pointed them, looking over their shoulder at you once more as they fled, panic still painted on their face. “Maybe don’t go grabbing unsuspecting people in the market all willy-nilly, assface,” you mumbled, rubbing the renewed ache in your chest.

“Way to keep a low profile, _trac’ika_ ” your companion said mirthfully, then shook his head. He began to walk away and you followed at his flank, the foundling’s pod hovering behind you. “Can’t take you anywhere.”

“They _grabbed_ me! What was I supposed to do, ask them calmly and politely to pretty-please with sugar on top disclose any malicious intent before I defended myself?”

“Hell no,” he said. “Fight first, forgiveness later. You had the right idea.”

“Thank you,” you said, shouldering through a clump of people. “Was that so hard for you to say?”

“Yes. But here’s something that’s easier.”

“Hmm?” you looked at him as you walked side by side.

“ _You’re a shit magnet_ ,” he said, enunciating each word. He didn’t turn to look at you as you scowled. “You gave the bacta, what, ten minutes to work before you’re out ass-deep in another scrap?”

“I—They—What—“ you sputtered in disbelief. You took a deep breath through your nose and growled it out. “You’re fucking with me, aren’t you?”

“Only partially.” He paused at a merchant’s stall, pointed at a pile of small, dead reptiles and held up three fingers, then pointed at a mound of different creatures and did the same. Baby food. You suppressed a grimace as he paid the seller, took the parcel, and continued on.

“I got some interesting news from a source,” he said, apropos of nothing. “It’ll have to wait until we’re back on the ship, though.”

“Tease,” you said. “Why would you even mention it now! Is it good or bad?”

“It’s news.”

You shook your fist at him in frustration and mimed a choking gesture with both hands. “One of these days…” you warned.

You backtracked through the square to the shop where you’d bought your rations. The vendor wordlessly pointed the Mandalorian to a large bundle wrapped in netting. He turned to hand you the smaller parcels he’d been carrying, but paused halfway through the movement and pulled them away slightly.

“You sure you can manage these?” he asked.

“There’s _still_ sand in my boots,” you said, stepping forward and taking the items from his hands. “I will fling it in your eyes.”

“Good luck,” he said. He tapped the face of his helmet.

“It’ll get in there. Sand finds a way.”

You would have stowed the packages in your improvised baby-sling, which was wadded up and shoved in your pocket, but your chest was still sore. Instead, you just carried them, arms tucked close to your body. He picked up the sack of rations, slung it over his shoulder effortlessly, and the three of you made your way back toward the Razor Crest.

The kid woke up just outside town, and you convinced the Mandalorian to let him out of his pod to stretch his wee little legs on the half-hour walk. This had the added benefit of turning the cradle into a hovering shopping cart, lightening your load and your companion’s.

The downside was that it was only a half-hour walk when you had adult-size legs and an ability to focus on walking, rather than wandering off the path every four seconds to pick something up. It was adorable, though, to watch him furiously toddle off at snail-speed and come running back, excitedly proffering his treasures to you or his caretaker as you made your slow progress back to the ship.

On what must’ve been at least his tenth fishing trip, he came back with a pure white flower, and bore it aloft to the Mandalorian. He thanked him in the way adults always thank children, and then turned to you.

“Here,” he said to the child. “We’ll give this to your friend to wear.”

He reached out and tucked the stem into a fold of your headscarf. Warmth buzzed in your chest at the gesture, and the foundling perked his ears and giggled, which made you smile in turn. In a flash, he was gone again on another hunting expedition. A moment later, he returned with a long blade of grass with a seed pod at the end, which he again gave to the Mandalorian. He looked at him expectantly, then gestured up at you with a tiny green hand.

_Ah, shit._

Just like that, the game had changed, from “ _Hey look at this thing!_ ” to “ _Put this thing in there!_ ” and before you knew it, your head was covered in all manner of nature.

You turned your head to your companion slowly and then jerked it to a stop as you made eye contact with his visor, jiggling the dangling ornaments for effect.

“My head looks like a bird’s nest,” you said flatly. “For, like, a really horny bird.”

A laugh rushed out of the Mandalorian and that familiar warm feeling bloomed in your chest again. You smiled and shook your head.

The sun started to dip down in the sky and the kid began to slow, so the Mandalorian scooped him up and carried him the rest of the way to the ship. By the time you were walking up the ramp, his ears were drooping and he’d drifted off. You lifted the packages out of his pod quietly and placed them on top of a crate. Wrapping your hand around the strap of the bag of rations, you felt the Mandalorian step closer to you.

You turned to look at him and he inclined his head toward you once, then shifted to hand you the child. Trading places with you, he silently heaved the sack of provisions out of the cradle and set it on the floor of the cargo bay. You pressed the foundling to your chest so you could adjust your grip on him, and felt his mythosaur pendant rest against your own necklace through the layers of cloth. After holding him there for a brief moment, one hand on his back and the other cradling his fuzzy little head, you bent forward and placed him in his blankets, pleased to find you hadn’t woken him in the process.

Without thinking about it, you reached up and untucked one of his treasures from your headwrap—a snow-white feather with tea-colored speckles—and placed it on the blanket next to his tiny sleeping form.

The Mandalorian started to form a gesture and then stopped, but the movement took you from your reverie. You turned to look at him as he stood in the close space with a weird posture, his arms held at a stiff angle. Suddenly, you felt lumpish and awkward.

“I better go undo—“ you said, gesturing up at your head. “Yeah.”

He paused for a beat, then nodded once. He was blocking the thin passageway between the cargo crates, the bag of goods, and the weapons cabinet, so he turned sideways as he stepped diagonally toward and past you to let you through. You walked into the narrow opening, and he stood up taller and leaned back to make another inch of space, holding out his arm in invitation, an unspoken “ _right this way._ ” You felt him lightly press his other hand to your upper back as you passed, a casual gesture of guidance that left your skin tingling.

You resisted the urge to freeze or look back at him, instead walking all the way to the cot, plopping down on it and setting to work unadorning your head wrap while a sensation you couldn’t quite name hummed in your chest. In a few moments, you had a lapful of trinkets, each more odd and beautiful than the last. You brushed your fingertips over the pile affectionately and felt the Mandalorian approach. You looked up as he reached down toward your head.

“Missed one,” he said, offering you the same white bloom as before. You took it between your fingers and twirled it, then brought it to your nose and breathed in its scent. It was surprisingly earthy and deep for a flower, and had a tinge of spice to it. It was oddly familiar.

When you raised your gaze to look at the Mandalorian again, he was gone. You dug a book out of your knapsack and pressed the soft white blossom between its pages and closed it. You stroked the linen cover and pressed your palm against it for a moment, then tucked it back into your bag. The rest of your baubles were placed into an empty broth canister; you shoved down the desire to cradle it to your heart and instead stowed it next to the bed.

Some kind of hangover washed over you and you lay down for a moment, the familiar sounds of the Razor Crest humming to life around you.

You were starting to feel at home here, and that made you want to run.


	14. Spinto

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In transit to a freak-out and the middle of nowhere.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Glossary  
> K'uur: hush, "shh"  
> Udesii: calm down

You rose from the cot and crossed the belly of the ship to grab your parcels from the pile on the cargo crate, then stacked them next to your knapsack. A long, slow sigh seeped from you and you felt your heart turn to lead for a flicker of a moment, but you shook yourself loose, brushed your palms down your overshirt, and headed up to the control room.

The cockpit doors slid open for you, and you made your way to the seat that had become “yours.” The Mandalorian kept his back to you, navigating the ship out of the upper atmosphere of Lokori and into the cold quiet of space.

“The kid ran himself ragged down there,” he said after a few seconds’ silence. He gestured to the open pod where the foundling lay sleeping. “Out like a light.”

It was no new sight to you—you often found yourself watching the child sleeping—but it was as horrifically cute as ever. The gentle rise and fall of his burlap-covered chest, the small twitches of his ears and nose as he dreamed, the sleepy, content sounds he made as he floated back to consciousness, they had all become familiar. When you sat with that thought, you found yourself uncomfortable with the implication, so you ignored it and pressed on down a different path.

“I’m glad he got to roam around a little,” you said. “Burn off some energy. We were all getting a bit cooped up after so long with no shore leave.”

“We’ll set back down soon,” he said after a nod. “Speaking of…”

He pressed a few buttons in rapid, exacting order and hovered a finger over one more. It blew you away how well he knew his ship; you were sure he could go through this procedure—or any of the ship’s others—blindfolded, with half a bottle of Narcolethe in him. The muscle memory impressed you, and the care behind it made an even bigger impact. You’d yet to find so much as a single dust bunny anywhere on the craft. To say it was meticulously maintained would be an understatement. 

You clicked your seatbelt, wishing it didn’t make such a distinctive sound, then cinched it down and dropped your eyes to the floor.

“Three, two…”

He pressed the last button in the command sequence, and the Razor Crest glided into hyperspace. No lurch, no drop, no sound, really. But the sight beyond the viewscreen during the transition—watching stars and galaxies stretch out before you and then pause before you slingshotted past them—prickled in some part of your brain as _wrong_ , and it bothered you in a way you couldn’t describe, for reasons you didn’t have words for.

It was the pause that did it. The whole universe holding its breath at the apex of the climb, a split second that felt like it could go on forever, and then almost all sound was removed from your entire existence. Made you feel disconnected from your body, like your tangle of limbs would just continue on its unfathomably-fast journey while the essence of you was still there sitting in your seat waiting forever for something to happen. Or… well, like you said, you didn’t have words for it.

The warning was new—he’d only done it the last few times you’d traveled—and knowing he gave you a heads-up because he had picked up on how much you hated the transition made you feel small and embarrassed and childlike.

The Mandalorian turned in his chair to face you, and you knew you could raise your eyes again. He leaned his body toward you, rested his forearms on his knees and blew out a breath. Then he said three words that, once they finally clicked into place, scared the ever-living shit out of you:

“We missed one.”

You drew your brows together in confusion and searched your mind for what he possibly could have m—“Oh, _shit_.” You felt your forehead go slack and your face grow pale. “Back on… desert shithole planet?”

He nodded. “Stoga, yeah.”

“How did you—?” Your heart rate felt like it had doubled from thirty seconds ago.

“Contact on Lokori,” he said.

“You... No, you said you didn’t know much about Lokori. When we were going there,” you said, shaking your head, trying to process. “You had to look it up on the navcomp.”

He shrugged one shoulder and waved a hand. “Contact of a contact. Didn’t say it was a friend.”

“I—so—okay...” Your brain short-circuited and rebooted a few times in rapid succession, like it couldn’t decide whether to go with fight, flight, freeze, or faint and kept changing its mind halfway through the startup. “So, how did your contact—? How did _you_ even know to—? What—“

The Mandalorian slid from his chair and onto one knee in front of you, then reached out a hand and pressed his palm to your forehead, curling his fingers over your crown. His other hand wrapped around the back of your head and you felt him grab a fistful of the swirl of your headscarf and then release it as he hushed you in Mando’a.

“ _K’uur,_ shhh, _udesii,_ ” he whispered.

No one has ever in the history of the galaxy been calmed when they were told to ‘ _calm down_ ’ but this time… you kind of were.

It mostly worked to startle you into silence just by virtue of how odd and unexpected of a gesture it was, but his gentle, even tone _did_ relax you, and you found yourself closing your eyes and leaning into the pressure on your brow. You deepened your breathing and focused on hearing his voice as he continued.

“Yes, word traveled fast between Stoga and Lokori. Yes, it’s… concerning. But those systems are neighbors, more or less. Stoga is an outer-rim skughole and people only go there when they’re looking to stay off the radar. Sounds like there was a fourth guy in the group that attacked us—a lookout, maybe. Your… _defensive tactics_ made an impression, he asked around and my guy on Lokori picked up the chatter. Helical Hypercom’s right there, remember?”

You were trying to process what he’d said, but the foundling murmured softly in his pod, and you thought of the tiny sleeping innocent next to you. The sob of panic, you managed to choke down, but a tear slipped from the corner of your eye. His whole little life had been so fraught with danger already, and now you’d bumbled him into harm’s way, again, with your lack of control. If you’d been idly half-thinking about running before, you were mentally packing a bag now.

Your companion’s hand slid from your forehead and swiped at the tear as he grazed his palm along your hairline to your nape. You opened your eyes and he grasped you firmly at the crook of your neck.

“We will be fine.” The Mandalorian punctuated his speech by gently swaying you, like you were hysterical and he was trying to shake the frenzy out of you, only you were made of gunpowder and glass. “We didn’t give any ID on Stoga, didn’t talk to anybody, and only one merchant so much as looked at you. If anyone passively scanned us, we were carrying faked identicards. I don’t think we even _touched_ anything.”

“…Just money,” you said. Your stomach dropped and icewater flooded your veins. “You paid the leathersmith, and I paid the hangar attendant. He watched a girl with a headscarf and a blaster hole in her shirt walk a wounded Mandalorian onto a Razor Crest, and I paid him with a handful of blood-smeared credits. _Fuck_.”

“A smear of my blood won’t get anyone anywhere,” he said. His hand had drifted down to your deltoid, but he was still grounding you with his grip. “If there even _was_ any blood and _if_ he even noticed it— _or us_ —in the first place. He looked pretty checked out to me, and I was mostly healed up by then, so it’s possible it barely registered at all.”

You shook your head. “Ifs and possibilities have never really gone my way,” you said. “People were already looking for you and now I’ve added to it. You gotta drop me someplace, you’ll be safer, both of you. Where are we set to come out of hyperspace?” You pushed his hand from your arm and stood up, sidestepping past him and making your way to the console.

He huffed through his nose at you. “I’m not ‘dropping you’ anywhere. We’ll lay low, figure out if there’s a threat, and take care of it.”

“I’m serious,” you said, turning around to face him as he rose to meet you. “This isn’t a ‘helmet versus head’ type situation; I’m not being proud, I’m being sensible.”

“You’re being panicked and afraid; this is _exactly_ a ‘helmet versus head’ situation,” he said. He grabbed both your arms above the elbow and tilted his head down to more closely meet your eyes. “We’re going to set down in the middle of nowhere, we’re going to piece together some info, we’re going to figure out exactly what your—“ he hesitated a second, choosing his word “— _voice_ can do and how to put you in control of it, and we’ll go from there.”

The cockpit hummed with mechanical white noise for a long moment while you considered several possible paths that led to several possible futures.

“Just stay with us,” he said as he let you go, voice equal parts casual and earnest, and that put paid to it.

“If things even so much as _hint_ that they might go tits-up," you said, pointing a finger at the Mandalorian’s visor, "I will disappear." You punctuated the statement with a snap of your fingers. “I won’t bring any more heat down on you. Either of you. No matter what you say you can handle.” You turned your finger toward yourself and continued, “ _I_ can’t handle putting you, or him”—you pointed at the child—“in any more danger.”

———————————

Hours later, you stood on a wide, empty plain, nothing else in sight but the Razor Crest, far off at the horizon. Gusts howled across the open field, like the very atmosphere itself was trying to push you back toward the ship.

You looked out across the grass, the wind carving it into an endless, wavy, sun-bathed sea. The sky was green-tinged and cloudless, and it felt close enough to reach out and touch. Wanting to feel the sunlight and warm air on your skin, you shed your overshirt and turned your face up to the heavens. _Sunlight is purifying_ , you thought, but then wondered if you might need to stretch out on the surface of a star to burn yourself clean by the time this all shook out.

The Mandalorian approached you across the high-grown expanse. You turned away and took a few steps sunward, then tossed your overshirt into the fast-moving air. It danced and twisted in the wind, and sailed away from you.

“Mind holding onto that for me?” you asked into the wind. You didn’t have to turn around to know he’d snapped it out of the air, but you turned anyway. Sure enough, he held the bundle of fabric in one hand and gave no indication he ever so much as broke his stride. He nodded once and continued toward you, buffeted by the wind.

“Do you really think you should be out here?” you asked. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll open my mouth and send you flying?”

“I’m always a little afraid when you open your mouth,” he called back. The wind carried your voice to him, but he had to fight against it to be heard. “Nothing new.”

His glib response did little to settle your nerves. Neither had his agreeing to leave the kid on the ship, nor his assurances that you were the only souls for miles around and sure to be alone. Your mind still spun disaster after disaster, thinking of the myriad ways you could end up hurting this person who had such complete, fearless faith that you wouldn’t.

You knew better. You knew it would happen eventually, but you hoped it wouldn’t be today, here, under this infinite jade sky.

He reached you at last and shoved your overshirt into a pocket. “Ready?”

The vicious wind lashed the long grass around you, whipping the thick blades against your thighs. The bright sting was a sharp, welcome penitence and you closed your eyes to it. You took a few slow, full breaths, then opened your eyes.

“Ready.”


	15. Coperta

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Can this damn thing even be controlled?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have excitedly watched the new episodes and it's like Jon Favreau has been reading my notes for this story, how many breadcrumbs I'll get to tie to canon. No spoilers! <3

“You’re _holding back_ ,” the Mandalorian chided as another ineffectual ripple pulsed out across the grass with you at its center. You growled under your breath.

All you’d managed to eke out so far were a couple pushes so weak that you would’ve assumed they’d been imaginary—just a trick of the still-raging wind—if he hadn’t reacted to them, too. You were _pissed_ , teetering on the edge of screaming or sobbing in frustration.

“Alright, fucko, show me how it’s done,” you replied. You smoothed your headscarf, then reached toward him with a beckoning gesture.

The Mandalorian shrugged an agreement, took two steps toward you, and extended both arms. He held up one finger in the universal sign for “wait,” to ensure he had your attention—like he was some kind of two-bit holo-vid magician, the turd. Slowly, deliberately, he flared his fingers, reared back, and froze. In a flash, he shoved both palms hard against your shoulders, sending you sprawling flat onto your ass.

Your brain spun through reactions like a Canto Bight slot machine: rage, rage, scream, murder, rage, humor, rage, embarrassment, rage, murder, bewilderment, anger, manslaughter, and landed on—who could have seen it coming—rage. No, wait… _mirth_.

You laughed. You laughed _your absolute ass off_. The wheezy, breathless cackle made your eyes water. The sheer _gall_ of it was hilarious on its own, but the Mandalorian so seldom displayed his sense of humor that it was like being served a rare delicacy that reached up off the plate and insulted you, but tasted even better than you imagined.

He crossed his arms to wait while your laughter wound down and you swiped tears from your eyes and cheeks. The Mandalorian extended a hand to pull you up off the ground and you took it, giving him your wrist and grasping his, then getting to your feet with his assistance. You sobered up, took a couple deep breaths, brushed yourself off, and announced, “I hate you so much right now.”

He nodded once. “Good. Use it. Don’t you want to hurl me across the field? Shut me up for a minute?”

“Desperately.”

“Alright then, fucko,” he repeated back to you, mimicking your gesture from before. “Show me how it’s done.”

“I don’t know how it—“

He waved off the rest of your sentence and you growled in annoyance. You clenched your fists and focused on the task at hand. You conjured the memory of the alley on Stoga and let it play again for the hundredth time, trying to retrace your steps. Every muscle in your body tensed up as you prepared yourself; you drew your arms close to your flanks, squeezed your core, and screwed your eyes shut. Even your throat felt tight with the anticipation of shouting.

You drew in a breath, then let all that air and tension burst out of you as you shouted across the grassy plain. Your eyes flew open and you scanned the field around you, disheartened by the piddly ripple drifting away with you at its center.

“Again,” the Mandalorian said. “Now. Go.”

You obliged, but your shout was less controlled, verging on a weak scream. When you opened your eyes this time, there was no sign that your voice had any effect.

“Stop holding back. Dig down and do it again. _Focus_.”

“I’m getting tired,” you said, your heart pounding in your chest. “I need to rest.”

“A few more, come on,” he said, urging you to hurry up and go again.

You tried another shout, but nothing happened. You felt weary and defeated and you just wanted to go back to the ship and lay down. The wind against your skin had taken on a chill, causing gooseflesh to raise along your bare arms.

“You’re still holding back. What, are you afraid or something?” he goaded you, stepping closer.

Without changing your posture until it was too late, you drew your knee up to your chest and kicked him square in the stomach. Well, in the beskar _covering_ his stomach.

So, yeah. You sent him flying. Just maybe not in the way he was expecting.

“ _Of course I’m afraid_ , you absolute asshole,” you yelled, towering over him as he lay in a heap on the ground. A rant burst forth from you like a geyser and you clenched your fists tight at your sides. “Your life was already dangerous, you were already being tracked, and I’ve done nothing but make things worse because the one time this goddamn... _thing_ actually worked, I did it with an audience like an idiot, and now we’re going to have who-knows-what bad guys hunting us like vermin because I can’t control my shit!”

Your voice stopped shaking and grew stronger as you continued. You jabbed a finger at the Razor Crest on the horizon and then stamped your foot when hot, angry tears welled up in your eyes. “That little dude in there is a _child_ , none of this is his fault, and his life is constantly at risk from people he doesn’t even know exist, and _the Maker will have to pull the air out of my lungs his-damn-self before I will add even one more drop of fuel to the fire!_ ”

A massive gust of wind burst out from you as you shouted the final few words, flattening the grass and sending a puff of pollen up into the suddenly-still air.

You pivoted slowly to look at the plain around you and felt your mouth fall open. A galloping picked up in your chest and took your breath away. You closed your mouth and slapped both hands over top of it, as though your heart might otherwise leap out of the opening.

The Mandalorian sat bolt upright on the slightly-flatter ground, then rose slowly to his feet, scanning your surroundings. The two of you stood in the middle of a circle big enough to comfortably park an airspeeder. You crouched down and grazed your palms along the fractures in the grass where it had been bent and broken in your…outburst.

Your head swam and you felt yourself sway a little as you resumed standing. A light touch grazed your elbow, startling you just as the wind kicked up with its previous intensity. You heard the Mandalorian start to speak, but the electronic hum of his voice was lost in the rushing air.  
  
You hummed a question and leaned in a tiny bit to better hear him repeat himself, but he just shook his head. “Nothing,” he said with a wave of his hand, his volume louder this time.

A moment later, he bowed closer and gave voice to a worry you’d been harboring since back on Stoga. “See? It wasn’t a fluke. _You_ did this.”

You nodded almost imperceptibly, and closed your eyes to the sunlight and wind again, your head starting to ache.

“So you’re done being mean to me now, right?” you grumbled a minute later. You mimicked him with a little bitterness and said, “‘ _What are you, afraid or something?_ ’ Mean. Mean and uncalled-for."

“How else was I going to get an emotional outburst out of you?”

“I am an emotional _shotgun_ , you dick!” you said, a little frenzied. “Point me at anything and pull the trigger and I’ll hit it with an ‘emotional outburst.’ Draw a face on a fricking seed pod, name it Jeffrey, tell me it’s got some tragic backstory and a weird hobby, and then stomp on it, that’s all it takes. I’ll cry like a baby. You straight-ass _tormented_ me!”

You were being dramatic and you knew it, but your self-consciousness at getting needled into such a vulnerable display had you feeling a little prickly.

“Stop it,” the Mandalorian said shortly, taking one step toward you. You scowled, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Your link to this thing is right here,” he continued, jabbing you in the chest with his finger. “And the strongest feeling you’re letting yourself have is fear. _It_ _doesn’t work_. You’re marching the same path into the same battle over and over and _it doesn’t work_.”

“It just did!” you said, pointing your thumb over your shoulder. “Fear very much did just work.”

He shook his head. “That wasn’t fear. Not just fear for fear’s sake,” he said. “What was at the root of it?”

It was like a sunrise happened in your brain. Light dawned on something so obvious you felt like a prize turnip for having missed it.

“I—I don’t know, caring?” you said vaguely, warmth rising to your cheeks. “Worry. Loyalty. The idea of something happening to you and the kid because of me feels—“ You trailed off and shook your head. “Intolerable. Not just because it would be my fault, but because—I care if something happens to you…guys.”

“And what about last time?”

You’d been focusing so hard on recreating and weaponizing the tension you’d felt when the three of you were attacked that you forgot all about the reflective peace that had settled around you just before your… _power_ first revealed itself on Stoga. How you’d looked at the child and the Mandalorian and how it was like you absorbed his consciousness into your own head for a second when time stood still.

The fear and anger were what had kept you in that bright white prisonlike stasis, calmness was what set you free, and surrender was what saved your lives. Surrendering control, surrendering yourself, surrendering your fear and pride.

Fear had been the bars of your prison, and you’d been spending the whole afternoon trying to fashion it into a key. _Like an idiot_.

_Fight for what you love, rather than against what you hate._

“Well, shit,” you said.

——————————————————

The Mandalorian had made you a hot meal and a cup of shig while you’d gotten changed and re-wrapped your loosened scarf. The wind outside put a chill in the air, but the Razor Crest had been baking in the sun, and it was blissfully warm inside. The two of you sat side by side with the hatch open, mostly blocked from the breeze.

You sniffled with the last bite of your meal and turned your efforts toward finishing the mug of broth. They were both perfectly spicy—your head was clear as a bell and your chest felt warm. Thoughts drifted past you and you must’ve got lost in your own head for a bit, absentmindedly fiddling with your necklace, because when the Mandalorian spoke, he startled you a little.

“No practicing on the ship,” he teased. “She’s been through enough.”

You smiled and shook your head. “Just thinking,” you said, tossing back the last of your shig.

The Mandalorian took the cup from you and stood, groaning softly as he rose.

“You alright over there, ol’ fella?” you asked.

“Yeah,” he said, clanking toward the galley. “Just… Got a little more than I bargained for when I was egging you on.”

“I knocked you on your ass,” you said with a chuckle. “Can’t say you didn’t have it coming.”

“Yep. Knew I’d piss you off, but… didn’t bank on _that_ ,” he said, handing you the refilled mug. “Now I know.”

You found yourself sipping your shig with an extra sprinkle of buoyancy in your spirit. “Now you know. We both learned some stuff today,” you said, and punctuated it with a slurp. “I think mine will be harder to integrate.”

“Why, will it be tough for you to keep your mind calm and not angry under intense pressure?” he said cheekily.

“This is how you get kicked again.”

“Anger,” he tsked.


	16. Allegro

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You expand your skill set.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Glossary  
> Resol'nare: The six tenets of the Mandalorian faith.  
> Ke'gev, haar'chak!: "Stop, dammit!"  
> Ke’sur’ar: "Concentrate," "focus." Given as a direction.

As you got a handle on your ability, you began trying to recreate the insight you’d had into the Mandalorian’s mind back on Stoga—with his permission this time. Mostly. He’d brought it up, asking you about it on the walk back to the ship after a practice session.

“So when you—“ he began, but hesitated; you guessed he was trying to choose a word. Apparently unable to find one, he mimed pushing with both hands. “Now that it...works, do you still… _read me_ when you do it?”

You shook your head, smiling at his euphemisms. “I don’t think so, at least,” you said, pausing to hum thoughtfully while you swallowed a mouthful of muja fruit. “Time doesn’t slow down like it did that first go-around, so there’s not a lot of spare brainpower left over for me to focus on other stuff. Everything happens too fast in real time.”

“Maybe with some practice,” he said. “Probably come in handy.”

“You volunteering to have me go digging around in your head?” you asked, snapping off another bite, then gesturing toward his helmet with the fruit in your hand. “Peeking under your metaphorical mattress and looking behind the veil?”

“Bit late to worry about it now,” he shrugged. “You’ve seen what you’re gonna see.”

So there you were, staring at each other across the cargo bay, ready to find out for sure. You sat perched on a crate, rigid and stiff, trying not to fidget, while he leaned against the arms locker, still and staid. Nervous as you were, you’d think it was _your_ mind that someone was going to try and rifle through.

You gathered yourself up, calmed your mind, and closed your eyes. With some effort, you tried to stretch your senses out toward your companion. Self-consciousness started to bubble up in you, but you smoothed it down, a skill you’d been honing over the past few days of shouting practice. Awkward insecurity was a boner-killer, mentally speaking, and it was impossible to keep your attention on the task at hand when you were busy feeling like a fuckin’ _dork_ , so you’d been working to recognize it and shut it off. You dragged a fingertip along your forearm from the inside of your elbow to your wrist, the physical sensation used as ballast to balance you, to enable you to weather the doubt and bring your mind to heel.

With a deep breath, you coaxed yourself back into the moment. A warm, soothing light settled behind your vision and you thought you could feel the edges of another consciousness resting against yours. Your heart picked up its pace as you stretched just a little further, pressing past the hazy boundary.

The ever-present wind groaned against the open doorway of the Razor Crest, singing a mournful song that tugged your focus away from you. You scarcely had time to be distracted by it before the Mandalorian crossed the belly of the ship and closed the hatch. You opened your eyes and nodded your thanks in the sudden dim.

“I think I...” you flapped a hand in a vague gesture. “Did it a little, maybe. I got a feeling of... I guess neutral calm? Some curiosity, and a tiny sprinkle of worry.” You were pretty shocked it had worked at all. “Something else, but I hadn’t quite found it yet.”

“Good,” he said. “I’ll think about something different. Try again.”

You nodded and straightened your posture, closed your eyes, and went through the process again. The excitement of the first hint of success vied for your concentration, and when your forearm trick didn’t work, you had to up the ante, touching the fingers of both hands together then intertwining them for a moment and dragging one hand along the opposite palm. You lightly grazed the nails of your right hand against your left wrist, up your forearm, and to your elbow, reversed the gesture and came back down your arm to your fingertips, then repeated the process with your left. You performed the motion over and over, using the steady rhythm to distract your conscious perception, letting your deeper awareness reach out again.

Calm settled over you and the familiar glow warmed up in your mind. You stretched your attention, looking for the Mandalorian, and found him more easily this time, like he was closer somehow. You pressed against the misty separation between you with a little less effort, and found a more complex mix of emotions within. You sorted through them, a forager in a fertile wood, turning things over and collecting morsels by the handful.

“Contentment with an undercurrent of, like, bittersweet? Internal conflict, sacrifice with some guilt and shame. The smallest twinge of longing.” You opened your eyes. “I think, maybe, the same place I saw before. With the krill farmers. I don’t know, it’s not as vivid or detailed as it was the first time I did it on Stoga. It’s like I’m not picking up the whole transmission, just the emotions underneath, if that makes sense.”

“Our last day on Sorgan,” he said, nodding. “I knew I was going to leave, but— I thought about it. Watching the boy play, seeing the good we’d done, kicking back, being surrounded by a… community.” He blew out a breath. “’Nother bounty hunter turned up looking for the kid, and that was that. No more thinking about it.”

“Seems like you could have been happy there,” you said. A hint of jealousy flared in you at the thought. You’d still be stuck on Nevarro, dead or navigating all this weirdness alone if he’d settled down on Sorgan. You wouldn’t have this… companion, this friend—or his foundling. This was the closest you’d come to having a family in a decade and a half, and you owed it to a baby-hunting degenerate ruining the first shred of peace the Mandalorian had tasted in a long time. “I’m sorry you couldn’t stay.” You were surprised to feel the truth in the words as they left you.

“To stay there... I would have had to die,” he said. Your brow furrowed in confusion and he clarified: “This _version_ of me couldn’t have stayed alive, anyway. I’d have had to let that chapter end, leave...” he waved his hand up and down at his beskar and said, “all this behind. All of who I am.”

“Not _all_ of it,” you said gently. “There’s more to you than being Mandalorian. And there’s more to a Mandalorian than his armor.”

He shook his head. “Not how the Creed works. I gave my word, took a vow. Once I took it off, I couldn’t put it back on. Maybe I could still be… Din Djarin without the beskar,” he said, hesitating to say his own name, like he was still testing it out. “Without the weapons, without the _Resol’nare._ But what am I worth without my word?”

A heavy silence settled over him, and it was several seconds before he spoke again. “What’s a bounty hunter got in common with a bunch of farmers, anyway? We had to train them to wield a _stick_ ,” he said, disbelieving. “It took days. I was raised in the Fighting Corps. I don’t know how to be that peaceful. Can you imagine that? Me, _farming krill_?”

You tilted your head, really thinking about it. “No,” you decided, a smile creeping over your face. “Not really. But… I do think you’ve been making yourself lonely too long, for too little reason. And I don’t have to read you to know you think so, too. You told me when I first came on board that you’d been trying for a while to recruit people to travel with you; that’s because Mandalorians aren’t meant to be on our own. The ‘Clan of Two’ thing _sounds_ cute as hell—and it is—but you need more of a community than a baby almost twice your age can provide.”

A small amused sound trilled from the Mandalorian’s helmet.

“What’s funny?” you asked.

“‘Our,’” he repeated. “You said, ‘Mandalorians aren’t meant to be on _our_ own.’”

“Yeah. Why’s that funny?”

“Not funny,” he said. “Just the first time you’ve counted yourself among us since your… Mando side woke up.”

 _Woke up_ didn’t seem like exactly the right characterization—it was more that all this history and knowledge had been rendered invisible to you for all this time. You were going through your life totally unaware of what was hidden from your view, then suddenly, back on Stoga, the spell was broken, and it was all there again. It didn’t all introduce itself, it was more like when you went looking, there it was. You didn’t discover a whole bunch of memories that day, it was just that when a relevant link came up, your brain actually hitched a train of thought together that included your more Mandalorian synapses.

You shrugged, fiddling with the clasp of your necklace to cope with the awkward feeling budding in your gut. “I know I’m not ‘really Mandalorian’ to you,” you replied, matter-of-fact. “I didn’t swear a vow, I don’t wear armor; I was just born in Mandalorian space to a Mandalorian mother who wore armor less than a handful of times in my presence and then apparently went to great lengths to hide my ‘Mando side’ from me for some reason. You’re the only person I’ve been around since it all, whatever, unlocked. So I usually don’t call myself Mandalorian to you because you’re so...different from me in your, like, Mando-ishness. Didn’t want to make it a _thing_. I didn’t want you to feel like I was—I don’t know—horning in on your identity or something.”

You didn’t expect that to strike him silent, but it did.

A handful of seconds stretched out into a fucking eternity with you just sitting in your words like a dirty diaper. Your brain scrabbled for something to say to break the silence but couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t “sorry.” It took all of your restraint to resist the urge to read him again and see what he was feeling. After a five-second goddamn epoch, the Mandalorian finally spoke.

“I don’t—“

This eloquent and promising beginning was derailed by the whizzing of a spacecraft overhead. You both turned your heads to the sound and then, when it didn’t fade into the distance, you looked at each other in such sync it was as if you shared a brain. The craft was landing. The hair stood up on your bare arms and you wished for half a second that you were wearing your overshirt.

The Mandalorian pushed himself off the arms locker with his shoulder and flung it open, grabbing exactly what he wanted without rummaging around. Within seconds, he’d packed his pockets, passed a few items to you, and selected another blaster before closing the door. He thumbed the safety off and stalked to the hatch.

You turned to the pod where the child was sleeping, and pressed the little button to cover the top. In an abundance of caution, you pushed the cradle into the small sleeping quarters and shut the door.

Once again hating the feeling of a blaster in your hand, you padded back to where the Mandalorian stood, pressing your shoulder to the opposite side of the hatch. He grabbed the door’s manual control, twisted it, and opened it a fraction to peer outside. You saw two sets of identical boots through the gap and your blood ran cold. He swore under his breath in Mando’a and closed it again, clanking the override lever back into place.

“At least eight,” he said, all business. “Professionals. Heavily armed.”

“Two on this side,” you said. “And that was just what I saw behind your shoulder.”

He dipped his chin in acknowledgment. Your heart hammered against your ribs so hard you were sure he must be able to hear it.

“Send out the girl and we will let you leave,” came a booming, amplified voice from outside. “No one will be hurt.”

The Mandalorian scoffed, like that was the most deeply inane shit he’d ever heard, which made you feel glad and guilty all at the same time. Your fear warred with your loyalty, but eventually there was a victor.

“Open the door,” you said. “Enough.”

“Stop,” he said. “We’re gonna handle this, don’t be stupid.”

“No, what did I say when we first landed here?” you said, reaching up for the hatch release handle. “Things have officially gone tits-up, and it’s time for me to keep my—“

“ _Ke’gev, haar’chak!_ ” he growled. He wrapped his free hand around your upper arm and squeezed, hard. “I will not just leave you to the nydaks. You wanna set your life on fire, you do it on your own time, and you don’t make me watch. My whole tribe got wiped out for helping me and the kid get off Nevarro; I’ve got one other Mandalorian left, and we’re not throwing that away out of _cowardice_. We fight our way out or we die worthy of being called Mandalorian.”

You opened your mouth to argue—to say that people dying because they wanted to help him was _exactly_ the type of thing you were trying to avoid having happen on your behalf—but you heard what he wasn’t saying, and you relented.

These dicks weren’t just gonna let the Mandalorian leave, anyway.

It took two tries and a hard swallow to get your voice to come out of your throat, but you managed to say, “Fine. Fuck it. Been in worse scrapes. What’s the plan?”

“Open the door, kill what moves,” he said. “Can you get us a little space to work when things get tight?” He made a shoving gesture. “We can’t stay in the ship, they’ll throw an explosive in here and it’ll be over. We get thirty seconds of cover at the most.”

“Cool, cool, totally” you said, keeping the wobble from your voice. “So no pressure. Which is lucky, because this whole…thing doesn’t react super well to pressure. So noooo pressure.”

“Good thing we’ve been practicing,” he said, pressing his back flat against the side of the ship and adjusting the strap of his sniper rifle. “You can do this. You already have, dozens of times.”

He reached out and paused with his hand hovering over the button that controlled the hatch. “Show ‘em why they shouldn’t mess with Mandalorians,” he said, then engaged it.

With a hiss of hydraulics, the door opened, and every possible version of your future disappeared from existence forever, except for one.

You readied your blaster and trained it on the spot you’d last seen a pair of black leather boots. As soon as the gap in the doorway was wide enough to see outside, you adjusted your aim and shot twice into the chest of the first thug you could get in your sights, who had his own blaster raised in your direction. He crumpled to the ground and you pressed yourself back against the wall and out of sight. A hail of bolts flew past you and into the belly of the ship, pinging off of its interior.

The Mandalorian stopped the descent of the ramp once there was a space big enough to shoot through, giving you a very limited vantage point but at least granting you the high ground. He fired on his own targets with a pistol, the quarters too cramped to use his rifle.

You scanned the field for movement, but saw nothing. A handful of seconds later, the Mandalorian stopped his burst of fire. He tapped at the electronics in his bracer, then looked at you, pointed to the left of the hatch, used the Tusken hand sign for “on my count” and held up three fingers. As you watched, he put down one finger, then another.

 _Three… two… one_.

He hit the emergency release for the door, and it crashed to the ground with an echoing thud. As the door dropped, the Mandalorian tossed something away to the right and jumped out to the left. You provided cover, firing your blaster toward the pairs of boots you could just barely see from where you stood. An explosion near where you were shooting threw grass and smoke into the air, and you jumped out of the Razor Crest while your attackers were distracted. The Mandalorian caught you and slowed your fall, depositing you on the ground and stepping between you and the remaining mercenaries who were retreating to cover. You continued to shoot at the targets, all of whom were dressed in black pants and tunics with an undershirt the color of blood.

Bad guys in groups just _hate_ subtlety. Anything worth saying is worth screaming as you shoot someone’s face off for money, apparently.

You ducked behind one of the ship’s aft landing pads and scanned for something to shoot at. The Mandalorian huddled close to you, both of you crouching down and trying to squeeze into cover. From what you could see, you’d eliminated four targets, which meant there were at least six left, none of whom were currently visible. Probably more, because your luck fuckin’ _sucked_ lately.

Something prickled in the back of your mind, and you scanned the environment for what your instincts were picking up on. You thought you saw a whisper of movement behind the other rear landing pad; you leveled your blaster at chest height and waited. Holding your aim, you summoned your focus and reached out with your mind, feeling for another consciousness. Almost immediately, you found the Mandalorian’s but brushed past it and kept widening the net. A few seconds later, you sensed another awareness and looked within it. Grim determination was all you could find in the mercenary’s mind, no matter how hard you focused.

You brought your attention back to your physical surroundings and nudged the Mandalorian. “Flanked,” you whispered, trying not to move your lips.

“Here, too,” he replied. “You’re up."

“Too far apart,” you said. The other foot of the landing gear was about ten meters away from you, which was further than you’d been able to push. They might get a strong breeze, but that would be about it.

He sighed through his nose. “Overheat your blaster. We’ll draw ‘em in.”

 _Son of a bitch._

You used a small movement of your thumb to loosen the gas canister and then jammed the cooling module. At the first sign of movement, you fired three times in quick succession toward the other lander. On the third round, your weapon made a fizzling sound and then a shower of sparks erupted from its body. Your startled reaction wasn’t entirely fake; a few of the sparks made contact with your skin and tiny, short-lived pinpricks of heat burrowed into your flesh. When you jerked away from the weapon, you bumped into the Mandalorian, knocking him from cover and sending him sprawling, his own blaster bouncing from his hand and coming to rest in the grass just out of reach. You spun and reached for him as he fell, but were too slow. You dropped to your knees on the edge of the metal landing gear. That was gonna hurt in the morning.

Seeing their opportunity, two of the mercenaries rose from cover with their guns trained on you. “Don’t move,” they said in unison. Cute. Wonder if they practiced.

The rest of them—six that you saw from here, plus the one or two that were now behind you—stood up and took a similar posture. You and the Mandalorian raised your hands in surrender.

“Just let him go,” you said, voice wavering with the powerful thundering in your chest. “I’ll go with you, no fighting, I swear, just… let him go.”

The one in the middle of the group—whose undershirt was black rather than red, leading you to assume he was the leader—made a derisive snort and stepped toward you with his blaster aimed at your chest. “Bind their hands. Stun that one,” he said to his men, jerking his head toward the Mandalorian. “Remember your orders.”

The mercenaries closed in, and even though your plan was working, you began to feel like a caged animal. You worked to center yourself, to calm you inner panic, but couldn’t get control of it. Your mind raced with visions of the Mandalorian being bound and stunned, and you delivered to fuck-knows-who, the kid handed back to those sadistic pricks who were running experiments on him.

“ _Ke’sur’ar_ ,” the Mandalorian whispered. “It’ll be okay.”

You wished you could feel his same confidence, his same calm. A thought occurred to you.

Your mind reached out toward his, always nearby, and passed through the hazy barrier between you. As you expected, his composure was the first sensation that greeted you, washing over your frazzled mind like a warm tide. You took in his emotional state for a second, letting yourself bask in the confidence he held. There was worry in there, too, plus some anger, confusion, and loyalty.

What surprised you was the faith. A warrior would be composed in battle, that was expected. But it went beyond just self-control—he had _faith_. In you. It wrapped around all the other emotions he was feeling, and anchored everything in place, making a calm harbor in the storm.

You steeped yourself in that calm, then gathered it into you and detonated it.

An enormous blast erupted with you at its center. You threw out your arms and shouted, and your assailants flew back across the field, launched away from you and the Mandalorian. A few yelps and exclamations went up as they thumped to the ground, scattered among the grass. The blow echoed off the hull of the Razor Crest and rang into the sudden quiet, the wind having fallen completely still.

The Mandalorian dashed forward into range, flicked a movement with his wrist and several tiny charges flew out across the field, detonating against your attackers as they scrabbled for their blasters. The Whistling Birds found their homes, and after a hail of small explosions, the field fell silent once more. You spun on your heel and retrieved another, smaller blaster from where you'd stashed it in a thigh pocket. You took a step forward, looking for movement in the grass, and fired twice when you found it. Unsure if there was one more to go, you crept toward the edge of the flattened grass, scanning for a target.

The Mandalorian approached, pressing buttons on his bracer and looking into the grass. You needed to get one of those fuckin' x-ray holo-vid superhero helmets. He shook his head. "All clear."

You let out a massive exhale and holstered your weapon. Adrenaline began to recede, and the trembling started in your limbs, but you felt surprisingly composed.

“Nice job,” he said, bumping your shoulder with a fist. “That was… Nice job.”

Relief swelled in you so strongly it took your breath away. Without really consciously choosing to do so, you flung your arms around the Mandalorian, the beskar of your pendant clanking against his chestplate. He stiffened, holding his arms out from his body at an awkward angle, and you moved to release him as your composure came back to you, but then he wrapped his arms around your back and squeezed. He splayed the fingers of both hands across your upper back and shoulders and pressed you to his chest. You felt your body relax and tears welled up in your eyes. You hadn’t been hugged in... fuck, ten years at least. Not like this. Not like a life raft. The Mandalorian sighed, and you felt the air brush against your face.

The roar of engines coming to life startled you apart, and you both looked on as the large shuttle your assailants had flown in on lifted off and flew away.You drew your blaster and fired a couple ineffectual rounds at the hull, but it didn’t do a damn bit of good and you knew it wouldn’t.

“Ah, fuck,” you said, the understatement of the century.“That’s gonna be a problem.”


	17. Pensato

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Branching paths.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My laptop died. I typed this on my phone bc I'm a disaster.
> 
> Glossary
> 
> Alor’ika: affectionate version of “chief,” “boss,” “sir,” etc. Doesn’t signify any actual rank.

One of your dearest, slightly-guilty pleasures was lying awake in that stiff little cot, snuggled up under that scratchy green blanket and listening to the Mandalorian clatter around the ship’s galley.

He never seemed to sleep—at least, not for long enough for you to catch him—but he had to eat, and hearing that small proof of life gave you a tiny thrill and made your chest warm and full. Matching each subtle noise to an action was a sport you got better and better at with practice until you’d all but mastered it.

There’s the kettle grunting before it begins to clank; that’s the soft pop and hiss of the airtight shig canister opening; now comes an extra-big, scratchy pinch of behot; then some crinkly fourth step you hadn’t been able to suss out yet; and, finally, here’s the metallic tinkling of the water pouring in, and the light scraping sound of the stir-stick dancing along the bottom of the mug.

You’d never heard him actually slurp at the broth, though. Too risky to take his helmet off down in the bay where you might accidentally see him, you reckoned; when he was up in the cockpit he at least had _some_ advance notice while you deliberately clanked up the ladder.

The Mandalorian was a caretaker of sorts, at heart. Always putting food in the kid’s perpetually-hungry maw, thinking ahead to when the foundling would be tired and when he would wake, shoving a mugful of shig into your hands every time you turned around.

You’d miss that.

A lesser man might’ve offloaded care of a youngling at the earliest opportunity to the chick in convenient proximity, but he never really did, except a day or two at a time when he was going out on a “supply run” too dangerous for tag-alongs. Otherwise, the foundling was _his_ , and he was unflinchingly—if sometimes grudgingly—devoted.

Which isn’t to say you weren’t involved. The kid was your constant companion, toddling along behind you everywhere you went; it was impossible not to have a pretty equal hand in his care, and some of your influence had begun to take hold. You were a stickler for seatbelts, for example, and had so consistently buckled the little dude up whenever you were in atmo that he’d begun to try and do it himself.

(The Mandalorian teased you about the seatbelt at first, of course, and seemed a little defensive of the foundling’s pod, but you went on a rant about how “ _cradles don’t have inertial dampeners, dummy”_ and as fine as the pod was, it wouldn’t stop him from getting scrambled like a little green egg if the Razor Crest caught a rough re-entry. He’d relented after that.)

You whispered stories to the Child over his breakfasts in the mornings and he watched every movement of your face, rapt. Sometimes you’d have to pause the story to remind him to eat, which was pretty impressive, given his appetite. The wiggling of his enormous ears was so expressive it was almost language, and his bright eyes took in everything around him. He was a sponge, learning constantly from a single exposure and what seemed like pure intuition. He had a spirit for mischief and a stomach like a sarlaac and he made you laugh every single day.

He was as dear to you as his caretaker was, and you’d memorized each and every wrinkle on his sweet, infuriating little head before you left.

It was a dream that set you to leaving. An urgent, too-vivid, repeating vision that, eventually, you just couldn’t ignore any longer. After the ordeal with the dream about the white room and the Mandalorian giving you guff about not telling him until you’d been nearly poisoned to death, well, it was time to fess up.

The three of you were on the move again. In the nearly two weeks since those mercenaries had shown up, you hadn’t stayed in one place longer than a day or two. You still weren’t sure how they’d found you the first time, let alone what the fuck they _wanted_ from you, and neither you nor the Mandalorian was especially interested in finding either thing out right now. Better to keep moving; odds were they’d eventually lose track of you somewhere in the galaxy. The kid was too important to risk, and despite what you could be heard muttering every time you were even remotely inconvenienced, you didn’t _actually_ want someone to please kill you.

You climbed noisily up into the control room bearing gifts: two mugs of ill-prepared shig that you held stacked in one hand and in your pocket was a packet of savory, spicy seed crackers you’d been stealing away in your knapsack for secret midnight munchies ever since Lokori.

The door whooshed open and the Mandalorian turned to face you.

“Hey boss,” you said. He tilted his head just a tiny bit. “Got a second?”

He dipped his chin once, then turned for a quick moment to press three buttons on the ship’s console before returning his attention to you. He put his forearms on his thighs and leaned forward as you sat down.

Anxiety rose in you with his proximity in the already-tight quarters. You made your offering of broth to the Mandalorian—he splayed his hands, asking an unvoiced question but he took one of the mugs and somewhat-confusedly cradled it anyway. He couldn’t drink it with you sitting there, which you _knew_ but didn’t really _realize_ until just then.

“I’ll only be a minute,” you said with a wave of your own mug. “Then you can— Here.“ You pointed to his cup and handed him a stack of crackers.

“How did you find these?” he asked, the tiniest tension in his voice.

“I— I don’t know,” you shrugged, confused about why you felt like you should be defensive. “They were at a—I bought them, on Lokori.”

“You bought them on—“ He trailed off, nodding, and then shook his head and huffed a short laugh out of his helmet.

“What?” you asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “You… Nothing. What did you want to say?”

You groaned quietly. “Okay. Back when I got— When we found out the food was bad, we were talking about that white room dream I was having.”

“Did it come back?”

“No,” you said. “But you seemed so… It seemed like you wanted to know what was going on. So I figured I should mention that I’ve been having another weird dream. I’m sure it’s no big d—“

“Tell me.”

You blew out a deep breath. “It’s a mess, but at the start, there’s this tunnel or passageway and in the center is a pile of armor, and the beskar still sings, but it’s, I don’t know, wrong. Corrupted. I can’t hear it right.”

The Mandalorian leaned back but said nothing, so you continued.

“Then there’s some guy walking across a desert, but it’s so hot and so bright that I can’t make anything out except that he’s wearing a helmet and he’s carrying some kind of stick and he _feels_ familiar, if that makes any sense. He just keeps walking toward me but he never gets closer and then the sun sets and it gets dark so I lose track of him, and then it’s like I feel the sand swallow me up.”

There was more, but as is often the case with dreams, some of it was hard to put into words or didn’t make sense and the rest... Well, you couldn’t bear to tell him about the woman’s voice prophesying the end of the Mandalorians. Or the hatred you heard in _his_ voice when he spoke to you at the end of the dream, every single wretched night as you slept.

_A passageway—not the same one that had the pile of armor, you didn’t think, but there was definitely the same eerie sound to it. You were hurrying behind him carrying something, and he was stalking down the hall like he didn’t care if you followed. You dashed forward, then reached out with your empty hand and grabbed his arm at the elbow. He spun around and yanked free of your grasp, rage plain in his body language. You startled back and put your hands up in a posture of surrender, but stepped into his path. You looked around desperately, and begged, “Just let me— Din, I have a—“_

_“Don’t,” he growled. The hatred in his voice put a lump in your throat and set your heart to racing. “Nothing you could say to me right now is going to change my mind. Stand aside or I will move you.”_

Your focus snapped back to the present when he asked you exactly the question you were hoping he wouldn’t.

“How long?”

You closed your eyes to it. “Week or so,” you said with a feeble approximation of a casual shrug.

He crossed his arms and pressed his silence against you like a physical force, making the control room feel even smaller.

“Seventeen nights,” you confessed. “Exactly the same every time.”

He made a _what the fuck?_ gesture with one hand and you hurried to speak before he could voice his disappointment in your piss-poor communication skills.

“I know. I know, I… _Ugh_. I know. I’m sorry. Shit’s just been so crazy, I didn’t want to pile on.”

He sighed. “Is it as bad?” he asked. “Before, you were slapping yourself awake to keep from sleeping.”

You let out a single, ironic laugh. “My sleep is so hopelessly fucked by all the skipping from system to system that I honestly couldn’t keep myself awake if I wanted to. I genuinely never know what day it is or what time it’s supposed to be.” But you weren’t _afraid_ to fall asleep, you just kind of dreaded the feelings the dream brought about. “All things considered, it’s not as bad, no. Time isn’t fucky like it was in the other one. It’s just a dream.”

————

You lay awake the next night, half-assedly fighting sleep and smiling to yourself as the Mandalorian went about his ritual. _Grunt, clank, pop, scratch, crinkle, pour, scrape._

When he finished up, he walked softly toward your tiny sleeping quarters. He stepped close to the cracked-open doorway, paused for a moment, then retreated quietly back the way he came. Then he did it again—he paced past the room, stood there, and walked away. It was funny at first, but by the third pass you grew a little worried, so you spoke up. 

“Something on your mind, _alor’ika_?” you asked, sitting up and sliding the door open as he was turning to walk away again. He swiveled only his head in your direction and the rest of him froze for a second. His body caught up with him and he moved toward you, looming backlit in the doorway.

You sat up on the cot and scooted back, hugging your knees to your chest and leaning back against the wall to crane your neck to look at him as he towered over you in the cramped space. You felt about five inches tall in comparison.

“That’s the third time you’ve called me ‘boss’ lately,” he said, pressing the button to turn on the light. “What’s going on?”

You grimaced a little, but hoped it looked like you were flinching from the sudden brightness rather than his words. You hadn’t realized you were doing it, but now that he mentioned it… Being the wimpy little orphan that you were, you were probably putting a bit of defensive distance between yourself and someone who hurt your feelings every night while you slept. Whoops. “Nothing,” you lied. “Just… repeating my own jokes, I guess.”

He hummed a noise that said he was dissatisfied with your answer, but he let it drop. He handed a mug of shig down to you and then passed you a couple crackers, the same ones you’d given him yesterday.

“You didn’t like them?” you asked, frowning. They’d surely be stale by now. What a waste of carbs. “Regifting is pretty tacky, you know.”

“They’re mine,” he said. “From my own supply.” He produced a near-empty packet from a pocket along his thigh and dangled it by the seam, then waggled it at you. It made a very familiar crinkle, and you suddenly knew what the mystery step in his shig-making process was: grabbing a handful of crackers to eat alongside his broth.

You beamed up at him, unable to keep the amusement off your face. What were the odds that you’d both pick up the same weird little snack food? “You’ve got questionable taste, friend,” you said, saluting him with the cup before shoving a whole cracker into your mouth and chasing it down with a huge swig of the steaming, spicy liquid.

“Tell me about it,” he muttered, leaning to rest a shoulder against the door frame.

“What’s got you so restless in the middle of the night?” you asked. “Or… the middle of whatever-the-fuck time it is.” Space travel was fuckin’ weird. It basically meant being perpetually jet-lagged, and it was killing you, especially since you’d been moving so frequently. You were beginning to understand why interplanetary cargo transport was mostly left to droids; crewed ships would be full of lifeforms so sleep-deprived they’d be all but psychotic.

“Just—“ he paused. “Checking in. Making sure things were okay.”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Good. That’s— Good,” he said. He didn’t say anything else or, y’know, _leave_ , so you just kind of stared at each other. You suppressed the urge to reach out toward his mind to sense the underlying emotion withinand determine why he was so ill-at-ease. It was a temptation you found yourself fighting often. The notion of knowing what he was thinking—of _understanding_ his reactions and motivations—was attractive, but you knew it was an invasion, a line you shouldn’t cross. The child, you were less inclined to read. Much as you’d love to know what was going on in that fuzzy green head, there was a risk of him doing some... magic hand business if he thought it was an attack; kept you minding your p’s and q’s no matter how curious you were. 

“Here, sit down,” you said after half a minute, patting the blanket covering your bed. “You’re killing my neck.” You pressed yourself back a little further against the wall with the help of your one free hand.

He stood unmoving for a minute, then finally went to sit down, barely perched on the edge of the cot. You squinted at him as he shifted a tiny bit to find his balance, all tangled limbs and bulky armor.

“Are you—?” you laughed. “Are you afraid I’m going to bite through the beskar, or…?”

He heaved a sigh, then hopped over a few inches and splayed his hands as if to say, _“There, happy?”_

You slurped at your broth loudly and pointedly.

“I just wanted to…” He huffed and seemed to summon a little extra courage and blurted, “You’re thinking about sneaking off.”

You sputtered into your cup, dribbling a little broth on yourself while you coughed. You wiped your mouth with the back of your hand and swatted droplets from your shirt. “I—Why would you _say_ that?”

“That’s not a response,” he said, holding up a finger at you. There was no accusation or anger in his voice, just statement of fact.

You’d barely let yourself think about it at all, you had no idea how he’d picked up on your so-not-even-a-plan, but— “I think I have to go back to Carlac,” you said.

“Okay,” the Mandalorian said. “Why does that—“

“Because I don’t want to drag you and the kid into harm’s way again.” You corrected yourself and said, “Anymore. Whichever.”

“Shouldn’t I get a say in what we’re ‘dragged into?’” His composure slipped a little, and his voice took on the slightest edge.

You shook your head sadly. “No. No, I really don’t think you should. Because you’re loyal to the point of being blind to the risks to yourself. Look at what you’ve been through for the kid. You’re so loyal that you’d follow me backward into a wall of fire, trying to keep me safe; no matter whether I deserved that loyalty, no matter how genuinely stupid of an idea it was. And this _is_ a stupid idea.”

You took in a deep breath and inhaled the scent of behot combined with the uniquely-him metallic, smoky, sweet smell of the Mandalorian and became abruptly aware of the tight proximity between you. You had to wrestle your attention back from the single small butterfly in your stomach when he started to speak.

“Why Carlac?” he asked. “That place is crawling with the Empire, did you not see the same thing I did on that message from Karga?”

The recording from the Mandalorian’s contact repeated in your mind. _Can’t imagine why anyone would want to live on that frozen rock, but sounds like there’s a lot of ex-Imperial dogs sniffing around out that way lately, so it’s even more miserable than usual. So, uh… If you were planning a visit, Mando, I’d wait._ You recalled the pictures of Stormtroopers prowling along the streets you used to walk with your mother.

“Yeah. I don’t even know if it _is_ Carlac I need to go to, just a feeling. It’s a dangerous-ass maybe, which is exactly why it’s stupid, and exactly why I don’t want you or the little one anywhere near a planet lousy with Imps,” you said. “Anyone runs your chain codes and shit gets _bad_ fast.”

“What about _your_ chain code?” he said. “It can’t possibly be safe for you there.”

“What chain code?” you shrugged.

“You—“

“And no, it definitely isn’t safe for me either,” you interrupted. “This is a _dumb fucking idea_. But… There’s more to the dream I’ve been having. There was something my mom said to me: ‘The impact of our choices reaches far beyond our own grasp. The armor you choose to wear will decide more fates than just your own.’”

“I remember,” he said quietly.

Your mind flashed back to that first day onboard the Razor Crest, when you’d shown him your beskar-colored hair and told him about your mother’s words. The day he’d introduced you to his foundling. The day he’d gifted you the meaning of your mother’s words. _My ad bes’ika_. Your throat grew tight and you swallowed hard to clear it.

You sat up straighter to bring your attention back to you and flexed the tension from your spine. You let your focus drift into the middle distance and continued. “In the dream, I see two suits of old Mandalorian armor, and the beskar sings to me but I can’t hear much of what it’s— it’s too jumbled together; they’re singing different songs and the combination is… grating. They’re not compatible.”

The Mandalorian’s attention rested on you like a weight, and you looked back to him.

“I have to _choose_ ,” you said. “Between them. Whatever they are. Whatever it means.”

“I don’t see why it has to be done alone.”

“It probably doesn’t,” you said. “It doesn’t ‘have to be’ anything, but I _will be_ doing it alone because I would sooner do it alone and risk fucking it up all alone and suffer the consequences alone than blithely waltz the two of you into my weird chaotic bullshit some more and get you captured or killed. Period.

“Besides,” you lifted your cup toward him. “You’re on your own mission right now. You’ve gotta get the kid to his people. Having me on the ship is slowing you down; we’re too busy running from the stuff chasing me to go finding his Jedi. I’m ‘a shit magnet,’ remember?” You gave his words back to him good-naturedly but he didn’t seem to find it amusing.

“If the tables were turned, you’d just let me go do this, no fight?” he asked sarcastically. “Leave _you_ behind? Hope for the best?”

“‘Course not,” you said. “A bantha couldn’t drag me away.”

“But you expect _me_ to, what, drop you off and go back to my old life?” Disbelief and offense crept into his usually measured tone.

This was why you hadn’t said anything. The hurt in his voice made you want to take everything back. To say to hell with Carlac, to hell with your mother’s maybe-prophecy, to hell with all this cloak-and-dagger destiny bullshit. To choose a parallel path to his—parallel to this feeling of _home_ that you’d been missing for so long—rather than a path that diverged from it. But even without this dream hanging over your head, even without this magnetic pull to return to Carlac, you knew there was too much danger hunting you and the danger would keep rolling downhill onto him and his foundling. Until you had better control over yourself, they were going to be at risk. Unacceptable. So you pressed on.

“I _don’t_ expect you to, no,” you said. “But I _hope_ you do. I hope it’s not forever. I hope we find our way back to—“

He scoffed. “‘Hope.’”

“Yeah. Hope.” You looked down at your empty mug. “You guys matter to me, a lot, and I have no intention of letting go of— of this being our parting of ways. I hope you can eventually understand. But in the meantime, I hope you’ll hear me say ‘please’ and honor it. That you’ll hear me say how much I need to put this puzzle together, how much I need you guys to be safe while I do it, and say ‘okay.’”

“No chance,” he said softly. He took the mug from your hands and stood, heading toward the galley. You rose to follow him.

“Hence the ‘running off,’ as you put it,” you said with a smile you hoped didn’t look as hollow as it felt, didn’t look like your heart ached half to the point of breaking at the thought. He turned his back to you to mess with the kettle. “Though in my defense, I decided that was cowardly and I’d rather just talk t—“

“Stop,” he said, clanking the cup down hard on the top of a cabinet. He kept his back to you and after a few breaths, resumed his shig ritual. “Stop invoking honor when you’re asking me to surrender mine.”

“It’s not about honor,” you said softly. “Not like that. It’s about my past and my future and understanding my place in... My mom talked to me about fates and destinies and ancestors and all that my whole childhood. She would want me to—“ You clenched your fists to center yourself and collect your thoughts. “I need to do this, for her. I feel this... pull, and I feel like I need to do this alone. What’s dishonorable about respecting my wishes?”

“It’s _dishonorable_ to send you into danger with no one to watch your back. That’s not how Mandalorians—“

“We’re both trying like hell to keep the other safe, to live up to our own codes,” you said, grasping his elbow to turn him to face you. “Don’t you see that? And we can’t both win.”

He kept his chin level, like he was looking over your head instead of looking at you.

“We both got by on our own before,” you said. “We watched our own backs just fine, right?”

The Mandalorian looked down at you then. Your heart picked up its pace as his silence filled the whole cargo bay.

“It’s not the same anymore and you know it,” he said at last.

He took a breath, while yours caught in your chest.

“‘Mandalorians aren’t meant to be on our own,’” he said, reminding you of what you’d told him. “I’d forgotten. Adapted. But now...”

“We won’t be. Not for long,” you said, probably putting too much unfelt optimism in your voice. “Besides, you’ve got the little dude and it’s not like you’ve had a hard time finding people to travel with you in the past.” You swirled a hand around his chest elegantly and put on a posh accent to add, “Mister popularity.”

He lightly grabbed your wrist mid-gesture.

“Not me I’m worried about,” he said. “You were sloppy on your own. Reckless.”

“Just say ‘stupid,’ it’s faster.”

“Verged on suicidal,” he said. “It’s not just disregard for yourself, it’s almost _contempt_.”

You lowered your eyes from the crossbar of his visor to the bottom edge of his helmet.

“I can’t—“ he began. “I need to know that you’re safe. That I’m not just leaving another Mandalorian to fight and die alone.”

“Pfh, I’m not even really Mandalorian,” you said with a dismissive tone.

The Mandalorian took a step and closed all distance between you, his boots barely an inch from the tips of your toes. He touched a gloved hand to your face, his thumb resting on your cheekbone and his fingers lightly tracing the edge of your hair scarf.

“Where?” he said. “Where aren’t you Mandalorian?”

You could only stammer in response. A million thoughts raced through you but they tangled and tripped each other and you couldn’t sort them out. The warmth from his hand was the only thing you could focus on.

He smoothed his palm over your head covering. “You wear your helmet, like you vowed to. You have a code you follow, you honor your word and don’t back down from a fight. You speak Mando’a and it’s sweet from your mouth as _uj’alayi_. You’ve cared for the foundling as his mother. You even wear beskar.” Electricity hummed through you when the raised leather seam of his glove traced a path along your throat and lifted your pendant in evidence, brushing his thumb against the rough edges of the crystal embedded within. You could swear you heard it sing. “What could make you more Mandalorian?”

The kettle began to grunt, and he gently rested the beskar back against your skin then turned around.

In the shred of privacy, you widened your eyes then took two slow, silent, deep breaths to calm your thudding heart. He took up the rest of his ritual and you closed your eyes to better focus on the sounds, too aware this was likely to be the last time you heard them.

Every step of the process seemed to take him longer than usual, and you wondered if maybe you weren’t the only one trying to compose yourself.

By the time you heard the sound of the stir-stick scraping the bottom of the cup, you’d mostly conquered the hammering in your chest and had moved on to scrambling for something to say. The truth that bubbled out of you wasn’t the one you were aiming for, but it was a truth nonetheless.

“I’m afraid,” you whispered. You weren’t sure you’d be brave enough to say it once he turned around. “All the time now. I have too much fear to be a Mandalorian. I’m afraid of too much to be any kind of warrior. My ancestors would be ashamed.”

The stirring sound stopped, but the Mandalorian didn’t turn to face you. He placed his palms on the work surface and bowed his head, then exhaled.

“That’s the most reassuring thing you’ve said all night,” he said at last. “Even if it’s completely wrong.”

“Excuse me? I’m too chickenshit to be a real Mandalorian,” you said, “and that’s _reassuring_ to you?”

“Warriors aren’t immune to fear, _trac’ika_ ,” he said, facing you. “Fear just means you have something you can’t bear to lose. You might feel like you’re adrift in it, but your fear is an anchor—you’ve got something to care about, to come back for. Something to keep you from being reckless, something you’re bound to. A reason to stay safe.”

“Couple of ‘em,” you said before you could scare yourself out of it. You thought of the child napping in his pod, up in the control room. You hoped the foundling would understand what it meant for you to leave; you hoped he would understand that you wanted to come back. A small, grasping part of you hoped he would care that you were gone at all. That either of them would.

—————

You stood at the foot of the ramp of the Razor Crest and stared at the ever-wintered landscape that awaited you. A roaring wind pelted you with ice crystals, trying its damndest to push you back up the ramp and onto the ship, and the toes of your new boots were obscured from view by several inches of fresh-fallen snow. How could this have ever felt like home? You cradled the Child in a bundle of blankets against your ribs, trying not to squeeze all the desperate affection you felt for him into his tiny little body.

“I left his sling for you, hanging by the hatch,” you said. “Make sure to use it sometimes. He likes it; I think it makes him feel tall.”

“I’ll use it,” the Mandalorian said. “If you use this. Here.”

He held out a folded piece of thick, brown-gray wool, well-felted with use. You traded him your bundle for his, and unfolded it. It was a warm, worn cloak; it was a little long for you—not surprising given the Mandalorian’s considerable height advantage—but it would keep you relatively toasty in Carlac’s near-perpetual winter. Which was good because after nearly two decades living in the desert, your blood had thinned and you were a little short of cold weather gear.

“Figured people would notice if you weren’t dressed like a local,” he said. He wasn’t wrong; leathers and furs over a woolen base layer were practically the uniform around these parts, for practical, avoiding-hypothermia purposes.

“Plus you didn’t want me to freeze to death?” you teased.

“That’d be a bonus, yeah,” he said. You swung the fabric around you but struggled to find the clasps. The Mandalorian took the cloak gently from your hands and draped it onto his shoulder, then handed the foundling back to you. He gathered the top corners of the wool in one hand and reached both arms around your neck to spread the cloak out and fasten it at the shoulders. These seamless, unprompted handoffs were common, but they felt special to you every single time somehow, like an unspoken, shared language.

You looked from your companion to the child. You stroked the back of one finger from the base of his gigantic ear down to his wee little chin, planted four quick smooches on the top of his head, and handed him back to the Mandalorian.The instant he left your arms, you felt colder somehow.

“We still haven’t set up a rendezvous,” you said, then hummed thoughtfully. “Safe to assume you’ve been to Mos Eisley?”

He huffed what sounded like a short laugh. “Once or twice.”

“I’ve got a friend in the city, you could say. Meet me there on Harvest Day. Be easy to blend into the crowds. If I’m early, I’ll send word.”

He nodded once. He slung your knapsack off his arm and presented it to you. You hefted it onto your back and exhaled.

“Well, guess I should...” you trailed off. “No sense in you standing here freezing to death.”

You laid your hand on the child’s chest and focused your effort on sending emotions rather than receiving them. You beamed everything you felt for him as loud as you could manage, hoping he would feel it somehow. You wanted him to know you weren’t leaving _him_ , that your heart would be with him no matter where your feet were planted. His ears sagged then perked up and he made a sound you knew as a combination of curiosity and contentment. He raised a hand and squinted in concentration; warmth cascaded over you like bathwater, the same way it had the first time you’d met the foundling, and you beamed. _Love you too, little dude. Keep an eye on the big guy for me_.

The Mandalorian slid off his right glove and extended his hand to you. You looked down at it for a brief second—his skin was darker than you expected a hand so often gloved would be—then took it, fixing your grip around the wool at his wrist. Two of his fingertips slid beneath the sleeve of your undershirt as he grasped your arm, raising gooseflesh across your body. You brought your other hand up and wrapped it around the back of his, enveloping as much of his skin in your own as you could.

“Be safe. Please. If you find the kid a Jedi, tell them I...” You tried to come up with a suitable threat, but your heart wasn’t in it. All you had space for was fondness and fear. “I don’t know. Come up with something scary and give me credit, I trust you,” you smiled.

“Next time we meet, the suns will warm us both enough to forget this kind of cold ever even existed,” he said. The moist heat of his skin was so novel and searing that it brought tears to your eyes.

He released you after a moment and the cold crept back into your flesh immediately, but the humming in your nerves remained. Your head swam a little and when you turned to go, it took effort not to sway on your feet.

You walked into the treeline and out of their sight before you lost your nerve, hoping your gait looked more self-assured than you felt. The sensation of the Mandalorian’s skin on yours still buzzed along your arm, and you pressed your lips to your wrist where his fingertips had been, silent tears gliding from your chin and mingling with the fallen snow. You pulled on your mittens and gathered every shred of love and loyalty and light within you into a tight ball at your core and focused on beaming it to the hearts of the Mandalorian and the foundling. You hoped they would feel it, but even if they didn’t, they’d carry it with them anyway.

_May it steady their hearts and their steps, illuminate their path in the darkness, and keep them warm in the cold._

The fiendish chill in the air gnawed its way to your bones and opened a pit in your gut that whispered that you were forsaking one fate for another. You squared your shoulders and walked on, freezing away your own desires in exchange for the safety of the Mandalorian and the Child. The virgin snow crunched beneath your boots, and you pondered in which of your forefathers’ footsteps you would follow.


	18. Arpeggiato

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You reunite with an old friend of sorts on Carlac, and then end up somewhere else entirely.  
> Content warning for this chapter: mentions of torture, discussions of bruises. Nothing graphic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know most people don't read fanfic for the OC angle, but stick with me!  
> (This is a super long chapter, and there's another big chunk coming close behind it.)

Things had gone well enough at first. Sure, you were mourning the absence of your Mandalorian and your little green guy, fixated on the feeling of their skin on yours and "next time we meet," but you gathered up your composure and did what you did best: crammed down your emotions for the sake of the task at hand and moved forward. You’d more or less stopped your crying by the time you exited the pink-canopied forest (the fact that you forced yourself to stop because the tears were physically painful in the punishing cold was beside the point) and trudged through knee-high snow around the perimeter of the Ming Po village where you’d grown up. You kept to the deep-dusk shadows and watched your old house for signs of life. If it were unoccupied, your goal would have been much more easily achieved.

But that wouldn’t make for a very good story, and the universe will always bend events toward what makes for the best stories. So instead, the place was inhabited by people who _never seemed to fucking sleep_ , much less leave the damn house. 

You only needed to gain access to the root cellar, but even that much proved more difficult than it ought to have been. 

You watched the exterior cellar door from the ornate eaves of a neighboring house, pressed against the chimney for warmth. Two nights and a day you held vigil, waiting for your chance to sneak inside. Keeping yourself awake grew difficult after awhile, so you filled the hours by working on reading passers-by and sending small suggestions to their minds. You weren't ready for anything big, but you made one person look over their shoulder for a voice that wasn't there and another stepped around an obstacle that existed only in their imagination.

Always, though, your primary focus was on the inhabitants of the house. Did these people ever rest? No. Did they ever even _leave_? Fucking no. So, knowing you weren't going to be able to _suggest_ to the seven souls inside that they leave their home all at once, you gave them a real-life reason to focus their complete attention on the inside of the house for a few minutes, so they wouldn’t have any to spare for what was happening outside.

It was a bedroom you chose for an entry point: the chamber was empty and its door was open to the hall. You whispered an apology to the squirming mass wrapped in the base of your cloak, which growled in response, and slid open the window. In the interest of getting the most bang for your buck, you jiggled the creature around to get it good and feisty, then plopped it through the opening. The snowfeather bird hit the floor with a thud and then immediately set about trying to get the fuck out of the house with extreme urgency. 

Snowfeathers aren’t native to Carlac, but they’d ended up there somehow, thanks to interplanetary travel. They’re an interesting little critter, small and flightless, never having needed to evolve too much defensive ability beyond being poisonous to a frankly _shit-out-your-entire-skeleton_ degree. A meal of snowfeather wouldn’t kill you, but you’d sure as hell wish that it had. 

They had another nifty little evolutionary trick worth mentioning: they could pull from the Force and use it to project illusions. A scared snowfeather could make itself appear to you as a creature of whatever nightmare it chose: bigger, sharper, faster, deadlier. The bird was harmless at the end of the day, but it would stir up some major shit in the short term. 

Oh, to be a snowfeather bird.

You didn’t have to wait long to know your plan had worked. The frantic _pap-pap-pap_ of its feet on the floorboards mingled with confused noises and then shouting and scuffling as the residents of the home tried desperately to stay away from but also shoo out the magic hellbird. 

You dashed to the cellar door and flung it open. The Ming Po were an invariably trusting people and did not engage in deception; as such, they didn’t lock their doors or keep secrets, and they didn’t dig around for other people’s. If the situation were a little different, you probably could have just told them who you were, explained things and asked them to let you look around for what you were after. In this case, you needed to go unseen, lest the Imps catch sight or word of an outsider, so you had to sneak. You didn’t have the wide-set eyes and gray-white skin of the tribe, and your hair wasn’t quite monochrome like theirs—it would take less than half a glance to know you weren’t a local.

A second later, you entered the underground space, shoved your mittens in your pocket, and clicked on a small flashlight. The doorway bisecting the two-room cellar was exactly as it had been years ago, as normal-seeming as anything, but you remembered now what lay within. Pure muscle memory took over and you pressed one part of the wooden jamb left, which let another segment slide up, allowing you to push another down and then shift the last piece left. The mechanism clicked when it found its home and your heart began to gallop. The entire wooden jamb—about two hand-breadths wide—swung open like a tall, thin door to reveal a deep hidden space between the two sides of the wall. 

Nestled within was everything your mother had kept stashed away. You’d taken a few of her things with you when you’d fled into the forest, but the memory of this cache had been sealed off from you then, and so here it had remained for the intervening years. Her prized possessions all lay within this space, none dearer than her armor.

A haunting rendition of a familiar melody floated through you like an echo. With trembling fingers, you reached out and reverently pressed your skin to her beskar helmet. The armor’s desolate, mournful song nearly broke your heart. 

She’d never intended for it to sit there for decades, not just unused, but utterly neglected. The metal was dull with disuse and rusted in spots, the electronics were probably completely fried, and the leather straps for affixing the pieces were so dry you were shocked they hadn’t disintegrated under your touch. The beskar was a mess, and somehow, it was almost like it _knew_. 

You could remember her in her armor only a handful of times. You would catch short glimpses of her as she prepared to interact with other Mandalorians, and you were always transfixed by the sight of her, a magnificent and staid defender; she was a work of art in motion. Mandalorians don’t really believe in ceremonial armor—that is, fancied-up armor to wear only on special occasions. A Mandalorian’s everyday armor should always be in its best possible condition and included in significant events like a part of one’s clan; there was no need for a dressy version.

The armor had the dual benefit of immediately labeling her as Mandalorian and concealing her individual identity, a boon she did not need often, but when she did, she needed it desperately. 

So she donned it infrequently, but she visited it as often as a dear friend. Almost every night, she made her way down to the root cellar to maintain the armor, as reverently as a believer at prayer. You suspected it was how she had stayed connected to her identity across so many years of isolation. Much as she loved the Ming Po for keeping the two of you hidden and safe, she openly lamented the loneliness of being without a tribe. 

It was a loneliness you inherited; you’d known it well, even before you knew exactly what it was that you were missing. Hers, though, must have cut deeper. You had always known you had no history, no ties, no family. That hadn’t changed much when you lost your mother. But to have grown up within a bustling, lively community and then be torn away from it had to have been an unspeakable loss. You felt it now, so far from your Mandalorian and his foundling, and you could only imagine what it would be like to lose a whole planet. A whole people.

The beskar’s song rose in a broken woodwind crescendo, but at that moment, you noticed the scuffling upstairs had slowed. You shoved everything from the cabinet into the embroidered duffel that lay at the bottom, heaved the straps onto your shoulder, re-locked the compartment, and hurried back above ground. Gracelessly, you scrambled over a garden wall, hefted your belongings behind you, and made your way back into the forest. 

* * *

You looked like a scrap heap on two legs; there were no other words for it. Well, there probably _were_ other words, but they weren’t gonna be any nicer. 

The rusty, matte beskar was in the same state of disrepair as it had been when you first found it, but you’d made it look even worse by tearing strips of wool from the bottom of the cloak to reinforce the brittle, creaking leather fastening straps you had to use in the absence of real electromagnetic attachments. The upside was that your cloak was almost the right length now. And you had armor. The downsides were... numerous. 

You weren’t accustomed to walking in armor, first of all, so you kept clanking your thigh pieces against each other and scraping your bracers against the edges of your chestplate—the overall effect was that of a pillowcase full of silverware clattering down a flight of stairs in a hailstorm. To avoid giving the impression that a rock-filled teakettle had gained sentience and was barreling through the forest, you had to alter your gait to such a degree that you were walking like you'd just finished a weeklong trek across rough terrain on the back of a bantha.

What may have been worse was how heavy you were on your feet. Movement required significantly more energy than you were used to, and you woke each morning feeling sore with the extra effort.

To boot, you were ravenously hungry all the goddamn time, which created its own set of assaches. You could only steal so much from the Ming Po before they’d catch you, and the unrelenting winter made for pretty slim pickings in the wild. Haarshun had gotten you through up ‘til then, but your supplies of the tightly-rolled bread were nearly spent. You had one serving soaking in a cup of melted snow to soften, and only had a couple more after that.

Time was running out to make a move.

You’d intended to scour pretty much every inch of the abandoned camp outside of town, but the Imperial guards seemed particularly interested in that area and kept it surprisingly-tightly secured. A couple improvised flashbangs planted in different parts of the forest had drawn off a little more than half of them, which had allowed you to rummage briefly in a few spots. They’d returned annoyingly quickly, though, and you left pretty much empty-handed.

Worse, it had been ages and you were no closer to figuring out what the hell your nightly vision was about, or what you were supposed to do with it. You’d thought that by securing your mother’s beskar, something would change or become clearer, but it hadn’t. Whatever it was you were meant to do, you were no nearer to accomplishing it than you had been when you walked away from the warm company of the Mandalorian and the Child and into the lonely, frozen, pink-canopied forest.

So you were looking for a way to get off-world so you could regroup and try another tactic, and the Maker delivered in the absolute worst possible way. Because the Maker is a dick with a terrible sense of humor, and he’s always the only one in on the joke.

After you scarfed your haarshun—which made you uncomfortably full while doing very nearly _fuck-all_ to sate your bottomless hunger—you decided to make another run at the camp. It might’ve been wishful thinking, but you’d been pretty sure you saw the front-end of a speeder when you were scurrying away last time. Whether it was functional (or even, y’know, _there_ ) was anyone’s guess, but chances were good that if you got your hands on it, you could fix it, given time and a handful of parts. Neither of which were things you had, but that was a problem for Future You, not Present You. Right then, you just needed to feel like you were doing something productive, not merely committing more time to a monumental mistake.

Under cover of darkness, you crept to the edge of the forest before donning your mother’s armor. Once you emptied its contents onto your body, you folded up the duffel and shoved it in your knapsack. You turned the thighpieces a bit further outward this time in an effort to move more quietly. One of the _shuk’orok_ was damaged beyond use, and you weren’t sure what exactly would happen if it shorted out while you were wearing it, so you left that in your pack as well. Wearing a defective crushgaunt seemed like an unnecessary risk, even to you. Fuck did your mom even have _shuk’orok_ for in the first place? They were illegal. Must’ve been her dad’s influence.

The optics in the visor didn’t really work, but you were able to see through it well enough, even in the dark, so you chose to wear it anyway. It wouldn’t fit in your bag, and you damn sure weren’t just gonna set it down somewhere. You lovingly touched the soft pink tree blossom she’d painted over the right ear by hand shortly before she died, kissed your fingertips, then slipped the helmet over your crown.

There was a pattern to the Imperial patrols, and you knew that if you waited for the right moment, there would be a few decently-sized gaps to operate within. And so you wove your way in among the enemy, senses on alert for danger, trying to figure out what in blue fuck they could possibly be so interested in at an old abandoned camp site.

Just a turn or two from where you thought you’d seen the speeder, you got the sense that someone was looking at you. The whine of a blaster warming up stopped you cold before the Stormtrooper even spoke.

“You there,” came his modulated voice. “What do you think you’re doing?”

_Fuck._

“Oh, by the grace of the Maker!” you yelped, exaggerating a startle as you spun around. You threw your ungauntleted hand to your chest. “You snuck up on me! I—”

It was a stupid mistake, a reflex built of years of taking advantage of men underestimating you at first glance. But wide-eyed innocence was a bush-league tactic when you were clad head to toe in Mando armor. He didn’t wait for your bullshit answer, and he didn’t give you enough time to try and distract his thoughts with your mind. Instead, he radioed for his squadmates to converge on your location. _Double fuck_.

 _Okay, self, we’ve got one chance at this, and then we better run like hell and then get off this planet_. You readied your mind, taking deep breaths to smooth out your thoughts. Three more soldiers appeared around corners more or less simultaneously and raised their humming blasters at your chest. The tone vibrated a harmony around you, and you pulled it against your body like a blanket.

One more slow, deep breath, then you bellowed and pushed against them with all your concentration. A shockwave of snow flew up with you at its center, and the Troopers went flying backward. Before they hit the ground, you were already running, careening around corners and headed back to the safety of the forest.

You took a sharp turn between a stack of crates and a canvas tent wall, and crouched down for a second to reach out, seeking other consciousnesses. Voices called up in confusion, and you were definitely on the entire squadron’s radar, but you didn’t sense anyone super close by. Reckless with urgency, you made a break for it, sprinting for the woods, just fifty meters away. You cleared the line of tents and skirted around a cargo lift, then ran right past the motherfucking speeder that turned out to be there after all. A Stormtrooper rounded a bend and fired, missing you by at least a foot, but hitting a field generator that dutifully exploded and sent you flying back toward him.

The world went gray and high-pitched and seven kinds of wrong-side-up. You thumped against the ground, hard, the chunks of metal strapped to your body doing absolutely dick to absorb the shock of the fall. Every molecule of air you’d ever breathed in your entire life flew out of your lungs and you futilely gasped for air like a fish on land, finding none for endless eternal seconds as you worked to engage your diaphragm and coordinate your limbs to resume your escape.

Just as you heaved in a wheezing breath, your arms were kicked out from underneath you and your face hit the ground again. A heavy weight crushed against your back, and you reckoned the Imp had his boot against your spine. Bitter adrenaline coated your tongue, but you swallowed it down. You slammed your palms against the ground and shouted, pushing with every shred of your concentration, jolting your body into the air and jostling the Trooper from your back. You were halfway to your feet when another Stormtrooper kicked you in the chin and your brain slammed into your skull. Existence switched off.

* * *

Harvest Day came and went without you ever setting foot on Tatooine. In your defense, you hadn’t gotten much choice in the matter. 

The days drifted past you, their number all but an empty guess after a handful passed in exactly the same fashion. For the first few, you did little but sleep, vomit, and beg the Maker for death, your concussed brain bobbing in a lake of agony in your skull. Over time, you regained some of your faculties, but your routines didn’t shift much. Wake from a restless sleep to the sound of a delivery droid pushing a tray through a slat in the bottom of the cell door; pick through the semi-edible rations, trying to quiet the clawing hunger in your gut and the miserable ache in your head enough for you to think; wait in vain for someone to walk by that you might be able to influence; choke down another meal of half-spoiled trash; repeat. Meal deliveries were the only way to measure time, and you weren’t sure how many were served per day or what the distance between them was meant to be. Sometimes, it seemed as though days would stretch out between the droid’s visits; you wouldn’t put it past the Empire to randomize mealtimes just to fuck with their prisoners. Time deprivation was starting to wear on you, and you weren’t sure if the duration of your imprisonment would be better measured in days or weeks at this point.

You sat by the door, half-asleep and still waiting for someone to pass by, fiddling with a small shard of bone that had hidden in a bite of gristle-heavy meat and nearly broken your tooth a couple of days ago. A hint of movement hovered in your peripheral vision and you turned to look, but there was nothing there. A moment later, another fluttering blue blur caught your attention, but was gone when you spun toward it. You rose to your feet and were greeted by a strange feeling, like a loved one standing behind your shoulder but again, you saw nothing when you whirled around to see, though the movement stoked the crushing pain in your head. Curiosity and concern mounted in you. Something weird as fuck was happening, you were dead certain of it; you just weren't sure what it was, exactly.

Another flitting, fleeting burst of blue appeared at the corner of your eye, and you would have sworn you saw some kind of creature, but it was gone by the time your eyes focused on it. Familiar warmth spread across your skin from the inside out and though your heart soared, your confusion swelled. You had felt that sensation only a handful of times before, but you knew it as the work of the Child. The Child who _couldn't possibly be here_. You stowed the bone fragment in your undershirt. If the little one _was_ here, you were going to tear this shithole apart bit by bit with your bare hands and a whole bunch of no-family-having, ass-faced fascists were going to have a real bad last day alive.

"We gotta get out of here." The Mandalorian's voice, but... distant. Muffled. Like you were hearing him from underwater, almost, or separated by a field generator. It felt… unreal. Like a waking dream. You pinched your forearm as hard as you could to be sure, and winced against the pain that was very much there.

_What the fuck?_

You dropped to the floor, wanting to use all your energy to reach out to the foundling to get a clearer grasp of what he was sending you. _I’m here_ , you thought. _I’m here. We’ll keep you safe._ You fought to keep your own befuddled frenzy pushed down so you could focus.

A ship passed overhead, but the sound never reached your ears. Again, it was as if you were dreaming the sound. Or hallucinating it. You were gonna be _pissed_ if you were already losing your mind after such a brief stretch of isolation.

The Mandalorian spoke again, the same distorted, unreal tinge to his voice. "I'll see if I can buy you some time. Can you please hurry up?" The urgency you heard made your heart race and you squeezed your eyes closed, reaching, reaching, focusing to feel what was happening. You felt the child stretching out toward something and you strained to meet him.

Being without the sense of sight made putting the pieces together next to impossible and you were starting to lose control of your frustration and fear. Remembering the tactics you'd used to regain composure in the past, you dragged a finger along your forearm to anchor yourself. You blew out a long, slow breath and felt your balance begin to return to you, but it shattered to pieces immediately when you heard another ship overhead and then a sharp yell from the Mandalorian that was cut off with a dull thud. No sound followed.

Pure, blind terror slithered up and coiled around your throat. You scrambled to focus on any sign of movement from the Mandalorian but the more desperately your anguished mind grasped for information, the more your connection to the Child dimmed. You squeezed your fists so hard you felt a nail pierce your skin. Somewhere in your cell, something exploded and rained debris onto the ground.

_My little beastling, you must learn control._

Your poor mother, doomed to have to repeat her words to you for eternity because you just couldn't manage to keep hold of yourself.

It took several minutes of calm, focused breathing before you could hear anything from the Child aside from faint pops that might've been nothing or might've been blaster fire. As your link strengthened, you heard distant shouts but couldn't make out the words. Explosions rattled your concentration, doubly so when your imagination tried to fill in the rest of the puzzle and could only suggest that the Mandalorian and his foundling were in a war zone.

The Mandalorian spoke again and you let out a shaky, relieved sigh to hear his voice. "We gotta get out of here," he repeated. He strained against something and you heard something fight for traction on gravel and then fall. _He's okay, little guy. The big dude is okay._

"Okay I'm gonna protect you," the Mandalorian said. "Just stay there, I'll be back soon."

 _No, don't leave him! Don't go away!_ Your heart thundered in your chest and you felt your fingertips start to tingle with panic.

You pressed that anxious, hysterical part of you down again and tried to focus on more positive emotions. The Mandalorian would sooner die than let something happen to the foundling, but the muffled cacophony of blaster fire, explosions, and shouts made that all too real of a possibility. Still, the little one was all alone, and you felt his searching and confusion. _It's alright, youngling. You are loved. There are so many of us who will keep you safe._

Ships flew overhead once more, but they sounded like they were receding. Without warning, your vision was dazzled by bright daylight and you saw a rocky landscape with scattered shrubbery and plumes of smoke and dust in the distance.

A crimson beam soared down from the heavens and annihilated something on the ground. You saw an enormous chunk of machinery fly into the air just beyond an outcropping of rock. Ice-water rushed down your spine when you recognized the shape a half-second later as one of the Razor Crest's engines.

You barely had time to register what you'd seen when, like the flip of a switch, the Child was gone, and you were alone in your dark cell once more.

You grappled to restore your connection with the kid, but seconds ticked past and you felt nothing. Tears welled up in your eyes and either a sob or a scream raced up your throat.

Before you could let it out, the link with the Child returned to you, buoyed by some other consciousness you'd never felt before. It was strong and calm and quiet, and it buzzed with the Force.

Just as you reached the child and you felt him recognize you, his focus was wrenched away. Fear sparked in the foundling and quickly became an all-encompassing inferno. He was surrounded, under threat. Sight returned to you and you quickly wished it hadn't; four armored warriors surrounded your precious little one and snatched him up. You took in every detail but kept your mind on the kid and sent him calming thoughts—napping in his pod, playing with his little silver ball, story times and mealtimes and the myriad occasions he’d fallen asleep in your lap or arms. Your mental picture of him dozing on the Mandalorian's shoulder, swaddled and secure, the mudhorn watching over him as he slept. _Calm, my funny little fuzzball. Calm. Do not fear. Hope._

The other consciousness joined yours in urging him. _Do not fear. Hope._

You felt the connection between you fade, and got only the loosest impression of the Child flying away from the Mandalorian and a strange woman dressed in black. It was like the end of a song, when the sound dims to nonexistence but your brain dutifully continues to fill in the melody. As your link to the foundling evanesced, you beamed hope at him like a mantra. Hope and love and a promise. _You will be safe. I will never stop. Hope, little one. Hope._

The warm-water sensation vanished from you and you were left shivering on the hard floor in the dark. With no further reason to hold it back, panic rushed over you like a wave.

You found out what it was that was bubbling up in you: it was a scream. A brokenhearted, soul-rending howl that conveyed such pain and urgency that your captors rushed down the hall at once to investigate. You heard them clamoring at the cell door, demanding a response from you, but all you could do was keen like you were being rent in two. That innocent, mischievous little miracle was so terrified and so alone, in the hands of such blackhearted villains, and the Mandalorian's ship was destroyed on a planet that looked sparsely inhabited at best. Who would be able to rescue him?

The door to your cell slid open, and the answer revealed itself: _you_ would.

A Stormtrooper burst into the compartment and shoved your shoulder with his foot, knocking you to the deck and cutting off your wail. When you splayed your hands to catch yourself, you found it was a light fixture that had broken in your cell earlier. Glass was scattered all over the floor, and your hand landed right on a large shard. You closed your fist around it and surged to your feet, pushing the trooper's blaster aside with your empty hand and then burying the glass in his neck. His short cry turned to a bubbling, airy gurgle and he fell to the deck in a heap. One.

The next body through the door met a similar fate--they're taught not to, but they always lead through doors with their guns, the poor dumb bastards, and it's a built-in antipersonnel lever. Knock aside the blaster when he sticks it through the doorway and stab him in the neck. Swift but horrific death. _Whump_. Two. Yawn.

Numbers three and four were onto you, so they kept just outside the cell door, smushed against the bulkhead for cover. You pressed your back to the same bulkhead and crouched down to grab a fallen blaster. Once you released your grasp on the shard of glass, however, you realized that your hand didn't really...work. Your brain sent the message and the muscles contracted _extremely_ painfully, but your hand only flexed weakly. You heard the soft patter of blood on the ground, mixed with the electronic breaths of your jailers from the other side of the door. _Great work, genius, you shredded your hand._

_This'll make a hell of a story if I survive it._

You curled your non-dominant hand awkwardly around the blaster and jammed the butt of the short rifle against your biceps to stabilize it. It was unwieldy as hell, but it would still shoot. Probably.

You took in a breath and searched for the consciousness of one of the stormtroopers hiding just beyond the bulkhead. You found an exhilarated, scared mind filled with a single purpose: following orders. _Drop your weapon_ , you nudged. You felt no change in him. Taking on an Imperial Shitheel-in-Chief demeanor, you tried again. _Drop your weapon, Trooper, that is an order_. Nothing. After everything you'd just been through, your mind was spent. Or maybe they were just that resistant to you. Looked like you were going to have to get out of there the old-fashioned way.

Which you weren’t looking forward to, ‘cause the old-fashioned way _sucked dusty durni dick_. A moment’s lament for your missing beskar, and then you erupted into action.

You burst around the doorway with your blaster pointed down-- _take note, fuckos!_ \--then fired three times while you raised it. You hit the third guard in the chest and neck and then kicked him hard in the pelvis. Four was already firing before Three could drop out of the way, but was knocked off-balance by the falling sack of potatoes in plastoid armor that slumped into him. His rounds missed you, but yours missed him, too, and your blaster jammed on the last round. Hoo, boy, you were _fucked_.

Four stumbled backward and you advanced, stepping square on Three's unmoving chest to do so. You spun your weapon in your hand and grasped the barrel as it turned over, nearly dropping it in the process. Four regained his footing and was resuming his aim when you raised your rifle overhead and brought the butt of the gun crashing down on his helmet. He staggered as he fired, and hit you in the side of the leg. You growled, mercifully numb to the pain for the moment, and drove a hard kick down just above his knee. He cried out and crumpled; you kneed him in the head to daze him, righted your blaster, and fired into his neck. That was lucky. Braining the trooper with your blaster had unjammed it.

Alas, it takes more than four fuck-buckets to staff a prison ship, and you heard a commotion at the opposite end of the passageway. Your cue to go.

You booked it down the long, too-bright deck and ducked down a smaller side passage. Exhaustion pressed against you like a lead weight and trying to reach out with your mind to feel for consciousnesses around you made your head swim. Seemed you were going to have to escape fully on your own. From a prison ship. An _Imperial_ prison ship. Easy.

No other option available to you, you stuck your head around a corner to peer down the next corridor. The path was empty, and you could see another hall branched off a short ways down. It occurred to you that taking random rights and lefts as they appeared to you was an utterly piss-poor way to navigate, and if you wanted to have any shot in hell at getting off this ship, you probably would need to find an escape pod. But the first thing the Imps were going to do, knowing a prisoner had escaped, would be to lock down the kriffing escape pods.

 _Frick_. Alright, time was not on your side here.

Maybe if you got into the ductwork, you’d be able to get near the electrical systems that controlled the airlocks without being so easily spotted. If you could vent the room with the pods to space somehow—by telling the computer there was a fire in there, perhaps?—you might empty out the hangar and be able to make it to a pod. With one hand. Or you might decompress the whole fucking ship and kill everyone onboard.

Honestly? Win-win.

 _No, dummy,_ you chastened yourself. _If you die, who’s gonna help the kid?_

Fine. Everyone else was fair game, though.

Halfway down the hall, you spotted a vent at ground level. After doing a double-take to make sure the coast was clear, you fished the shard of bone from its place at your chest, hurried up to the vent, and immediately let out a string of hissed blasphemy that would have curled your mother’s pin-straight hair. The vent was held flush against the wall, hex-bolted down on all four sides, and since you unfortunately hadn’t had the foresight to smuggle a hex spanner in your ass when you were detained… you’d have to go find one. Probably also near the hangar. Everything was coming up you.

You scurried down the passageway, muttering under your breath about _typical Imp bullshit, why use a standard fastener that could be undone with anything skinny enough to fit in the slat in the bolt’s head when you could use some dumb overpriced poppycock that required a dumb overpriced wrench instead, am I right?_ when some instinct in the back of your brain caused you to duck. A blaster round zipped over your head and you again lamented being without your beskar. You spun on your heel, still crouched, and looked for the source of the gunfire but saw nothing. The nearest place you could take cover was several paces away, and for all you knew, it was where your attacker was hiding. Fuck. You sprang to your feet and sprinted down the hall, backtracking to your previous turn and skidding around the corner in your shitty, prison-uniform shoes.

_Whoops. Wrong choice._

A blow struck your jaw hard enough to dazzle your vision and the instant the world began to reappear, everything sizzled bright blue and your muscles went limp.

* * *

When the familiar sight of the two sets of armor materialized before you, you were already moving toward them. As you made your approach, the sound of your feet rustling against the floor gave way to the grating, discordant combination of their warring songs.

It didn’t take you long after that to realize you were dreaming.

Awareness was a new experience for you in these visions. You looked down at the hand that had been injured in the waking world, but found it was unblemished here. When you attempted to open and close your fist, however, nothing really happened. It didn’t hurt, but it didn’t quite respond, either, as if the connection weren’t fully there.

In the span of a blink, the picture before you changed, bringing you closer to the suits of armor and dropping your arm to your side, your eyes focused straight ahead. You screwed your eyes closed and flinched from the jarring sounds that burrowed more fervently into your ears, but found yourself immediately repositioned; your eyes were open and the beskar was now within arm’s reach. You stood perfectly centered between the two figures.

When you’d dreamt this scene before, you hadn’t been close enough to really see detail, but now you saw everything. The helmet of the armor on your uninjured side looked more or less like your mother’s, more or less like Din’s. The one on your injured side was open across the eyes and down the center of the face, quite unlike those you were accustomed to seeing, and was almost pointed at the top. Both bore a stylized shriek-hawk at the forehead, but that was the only similarity you could spot.

A branching, blue shape clawed its way across the chest of the first one in stark relief, while the second was nebulous as an echo called back across a field in a snowstorm. The entire second set of armor seemed fully shrouded in a cloak of mist and darkness--very much there, but thoroughly obscured from view.

The cacophonous music hammered ever louder, but you dared not wince against it again, lest you end up _inside_ one of the suits of armor or some other dreamworld fuckery. You got the sense that a choice had to be made; you didn’t want your dreaming brain, your basest nature to get to make the choice for you.

You reached with your good hand and hovered it over the beskar face of the more familiar-looking helmet. Half of the tune retreated into the background, allowing the other half to surge to the forefront. It thrummed like a heartbeat in the darkest woods, like a legacy, like clan. Like _power_. Your fingertips buzzed with it, then your hand, your arm, until it covered your whole body. The song raced through your veins and hummed across your skin like unseen armor and you felt utterly fucking invincible. It grew bolder and your pulse quickened to match its tempo. Your fingers stretched closer and you felt sharp and sure, resolute in the knowledge that your entire bloodline had been flowing—could only _ever_ have flowed—toward _this exact moment_.

Such certainty was utterly foreign to you and you wavered. A hint of chaotic conflict bled back into the timbre as you pulled your arm away, but now that you were familiar with a part of the song, you could more clearly hear its complement. It was day to the other song’s night—otherworldly to the other’s mundanity—and it swayed in and out of reach in a way that compelled you to seek to know it better. You raised your hand to the open face of the other helm, but the first tune did not recede right away; you had to will its music to the background with all the force of mind you could muster.

This new melody rose like a springtime sunrise and you nearly melted to the floor under its solace. Where the first had promised power, this one promised _strength_. Green-growth saplings hardening to ancient forests, as content to huddle together and shelter generations as they were to burn and begin again. Warm water cascaded across your skin, calling to mind the Child and all his mysterious power. The beskar breathed its song into you, your chest rising and falling apace. It was familiar, something you’d heard countless times before, in twilight birdsong and atmospheric entries and mugs of shig and grief-addled lamentations. This melody wove itself among every thread in the fabric of existence: curled around every joy, tangled in every injustice, braided into every exquisite cruelty. It didn’t sing of things preordained, it sang of choice. Of balance.

You returned your attention to the first set of armor and took in its song anew. Beneath the relentless rhythm, you now heard its undercurrent of deception and ruthlessness, the screams of villages burned, family forsaken, alliances broken in pursuit of self-serving ends. You saw it plain: all this melody had to offer was domination under the guise of birthright. No complexity, no depth, no balance. Nothing earned, only claimed.

There was no harmony to be heard here, no middle ground to tread, no bargain to be struck. Each path was anathema to the other.

Without hesitation, you returned your attention to the second set of armor and resolved to don it. Just before your fingertips met the beskar, a gauntlet from the first suit locked around your wrist and wrenched your hand away, its grip inescapable. You flung your other hand out and stretched to make contact with the second helmet, but the hostile armor caught it and crushed it in its grasp. You howled as agony seared through your arm, sparing only a fraction of a second’s focus to wonder at being able to feel such pain in a dream. The armor was pulling you toward it, wresting your hands to its face. Frantic with fear and agony, you threw your head to your destiny, crashing your cheek and temple into the open face of the second helmet. Pain detonated inside your skull.

You awoke screaming in blind torment and did not stop for quite some time.

* * *

“Tsk, tsk. Little Mandalorian, are you not warrior enough to withstand a bit of pain?” a voice crooned, eons later, after an extended agony had sundered you from your consciousness and the brief, blissful blackout yielded to a new waking misery. “How disappointing,” it said, not sounding disappointed at all.

Your blood froze with crystalized adrenaline and your breath bucked loose from your lungs.

With herculean effort, you wrenched open your eyes and found yourself looking into the smiling face of some garden-variety, boot-shining ISB toady. The fear did not recede—you were _strapped down_ to a fucking table in an interrogation chamber; only a fool would be unafraid—but annoyance rose alongside it. His slicked-down hair in particular made you want to put his head in a toilet. You were sure that every military force in the galaxy probably had uniform standards, but _come on_. If you’re slicking down your hair and throwing on a black uniform every day, you know _exactly_ which side of history you’re ending up on.

“They tell me that the IT-O unit has been thus far unable to convince you to share with us your reason for being on Carlac, or the nature of your…abilities,” he said in a thick, smooth Coruscanti accent. “Fascinating.” The small black droid hovered over his shoulder, directly above your bare, shackled feet. Its red photoreceptor gleamed and it occurred to you that it was much less menacing in this bright room than it had been in the dim. ‘Course, it helped that its instruments were folded away inside it, rather than buried into your flesh.

A haze of exhaustion and pain pressed against you from all sides, but even still, this smug prick stoked a warm fire of anger in your chest. You held his gaze but did not give him a response.

“I’m sorry that you were subjected to such an inexpert interview,” he continued, caressing a gash in your face with a fingertip. You clenched your jaw so hard you felt a tooth shift. “I was attending to some business in another sector when you were brought aboard. The plan was to wait for me to return before questioning you, but your…outburst necessitated a change of plan. I do regret to have kept you waiting, but—” he splayed his hands and beamed, “—I’m here now.”

Your mouth watered with the desire to spit in his face, but you swallowed it down in every sense. He would get no satisfaction from you.

Besides, he’d just start beating you sooner if you pissed him off, and you’d had so many head injuries lately that a hot cup of tea or a single spicy meal might rupture a blood vessel in your brain, much less a full-on retaliatory ass-kicking.

“Now, then,” he said, clasping his hands in front of him. “I would prefer to keep this interview as civilized as possible, but whether I succeed or fail at that will be entirely up to you. All I require is your cooperation.”

As he spoke to you, you alternated meeting his eyes and flitting your focus to the center of his forehead. Like there was a smear of shit or a huge pimple right in the middle and you couldn’t keep your eyes off it. Makes people self-conscious as fuck, even if they’ve got you trussed up and helpless as a Twi’lek bondage artist. You saw it begin to wear on him, saw him start to wonder what the hell you were looking at.

“Let us of course begin with something simple,” he said, turning his back to you and walking around to the other side of the table. “Please share with me your name and chain code.”

Straight to the hard stop. You focused on reaching out to his mind, to suggest he let you go, even knowing it was a long shot. All you’d been able to suggest to people had been small things; little illusions that didn’t interfere with things they already knew. Step around an obstacle that isn’t there, hear a noise that didn’t exist. To get a committed interrogator, someone who enjoyed torture, to release his prey? Not on the same scale.

“Once more, please,” he said in response to your silence, then moved his hands behind his back. “Your name, and your chain code.”

You remained silent, but your heart raced with knowledge of what was to come. _Let me go,_ you thought. _You got the answer you were looking for and now you can let me go._

“As you wish,” he said, and for a moment, you almost thought it had worked. Then he turned to a small silver table covered in the tools of his trade, and he applied them expertly.

* * *

Consciousness returned itself to you in a most unpleasant and unwelcome fashion. Again. You'd been hauled back to your cell. Wonderful. You could tell it was yours because it was all but pitch-goddamn-black thanks to the broken light fixture sparking weakly overhead. Home, sweet hellhole.

Maybe it was the drugs or the head injury—injur _ies_ , plural, you reckoned, though you weren’t sure how concussions stacked—but the room smelled and, like, _felt_ different. It was like there was less static in the air, or it wasn’t as ionized. Like leaving a room with a lot of electricity and stepping outside. Whatever. You had more pressing concerns.

To spare you the dignity of comfortably bleeding to death in your sleep, they'd splorched a puddle of wound glue in the palm of your ruined hand during one of your periods of unconsciousness. Three of your fingers were stuck together, a finger-width of the deepest laceration was uncoated and still oozing blood, and wound glue did precisely _fuck-all_ to reduce pain or promote healing. You assumed that was probably the point; their regular aid packs likely had all kinds of bacta in them, so someone would have had to specifically search for the one treatment that didn't do shit to make things better. They _wanted_ you weak, and they wanted you to hurt.

_Joke's on you, you bucket-headed dickweasels: I want me to hurt, too._

You surveyed the damage as best you could in the extremely faint light but couldn't really tell gash from glue. All you knew was it was tacky with blood in one spot and still barely responded when you tried to flex or extend your palm. Your ring and pinkie finger seemed to want to move a little, but they were glued to your dead fish of a middle finger so the trio just fluttered weakly when you attempted to wiggle them.

Next on your mental inventory was the throbbing in your leg. In a massive stroke of luck, Four’s blaster round had just grazed your leg, sparing you a massive exit wound and the loss of half your leg in an angry cloud of viscous red mist. The finger-length wound had, like your hand, just been glued over, and was dully growling its discontent. It moved when you asked it to, though, and your foot and toes did the same. Relief splashed over you; pain was whatever, paralysis would have been a problem.

You creaked to your feet, whispering a lullaby to yourself to distract from the pain that hummed through you as you rose. You swatted away a different pain—the memory of the last time you’d sang that tune, the kid with both fists full of jerky, ears upturned, staring at you as he waggled his tiny feet in time.

 _The kid_. Fuck.

A quick once-over of your cell confirmed that they’d had a droid sweep up the broken glass before you’d been returned to your cage. Not that stabbing anybody was a faculty you presently possessed, you reminded yourself, coagulated blood puddled in the palm you held cradled to your chest.

You remembered your previous plan to pry off a vent cover and commenced a search for a similar access in your cell. No dice—the cover of the vent in your room was attached from the other side, and it was so small you probably couldn’t fit your foot through it, much less your body.

Screaming probably wouldn’t work again, you mused.

The most deliciously stupid idea began to take shape in your mind. If you could somehow get the sparks from the broken light fixture to ignite something in your cell, maybe the door would open, or someone would at least come to investigate. It was going to be tricky to pull off; pretty much the worst thing that could happen on a starship was a fire, so everything on the ship would have been engineered to be as non-flammable as possible. That meant the clothes they’d given you, the shoes they put on your feet, the shitty little mat you slept on—most likely, none of it would burn. Furthermore, the ceilings were high to accommodate various species and you weren’t exactly Wookiee height.

Which is how you came to be cradling an unwieldy, limp dick of rolled-up cushion with a pile of your hair balanced at the tip. You’d painstakingly hacked off handfuls of your dark silver mane with the dried-out shard of bone and your non-dominant hand, gathered it into a clump, plopped it onto the mat, and then bore it aloft to the sparking light fixture like the worst possible offering to the Maker. You stretched and got the bedroll within reach of the sparks, then commenced feverishly praying that it would catch before the mat slumped over and rained hair down on your face, _again_. Was it your imagination, or did you catch a glimpse of a tiny wisp of smoke floating up in the flickering sparklight?

The unmistakable reek of burnt hair wafted down around you a moment later and you had to flex every fiber of your being to hold yourself still in the excitement. A weak orange glow reflected onto the ceiling, inciting your heart to gallop into your throat. You felt a grin carve its way across your face, your victory almost enough to stop you noticing the searing pain the smile caused in your busted lip and bruised jaw.

After several seconds, the air shifted around you and a faint hiss began to whisper in the walls.

Then the fire control system doused you from above. Marvelous.

The water that torrented down on you was so sharply, shockingy frigid it surely must’ve contained something to stop it from freezing solid. Your every muscle spasmed, locking up against the biting cold, which was agony enough, but you broke loose from the shock of it and proceeded to hurt yourself thrice more in rapid succession: first, you hurled the bed mat to the ground and kicked it for good measure, sending a retaliatory stab of pain through your leg; in your fit, you clenched both fists, or at least tried to, and were rewarded with a sensation eerily similar to having the tendons in your hand played like violin strings with a bow made of a hacksaw blade; and when you screwed up your face to cry in frustration and pain, an incredible ache bloomed from the angle of your jaw all the way up to the top of your head and the cut in your lip reopened and began to bleed.

Fuck it. Enough was enough. You sobbed. You sobbed and screamed and strongly considered a tantrum.

And then the damnedest thing happened: your cell door slid open. You almost didn’t notice, but some part of you caught on and stopped you mid-wail.

You waited for a line of Stormtroopers to come bustling in, or—Maker forbid—that ISB fuck and his only friend, TortureDroid, but no one entered. After a moment, you stepped gingerly toward the open doorway and poked your head out, fully expecting to be struck, but no one was there.

Surely this was some elaborate psychological torment, dangling the hope of escape in front of you, only to beat you for trying. But if they’d decided to beat you, they were going to beat you no matter what you did, so you may as well make a go of it.

You turned the opposite way down the passage from your previous jailbreak and ran like hell to the extent you were able. You cradled your ruined hand to your chest as you fled, which slowed you down and made you a little wobbly, but the force of swinging your arms to run lit a fire of pure fucking agony in your bones, so you had to accept the tradeoff. The combination of wet feet and an unsteady balance made for a few close calls on the corners, and you nearly careened into the wall more than once.

On your third turn, you noticed a familiar sound reaching your ears, but you couldn’t place it. It was a dissonant, eerie tone that set your teeth on edge and felt _wrong_. It added to the nightmarish, hallucinatory quality of the experience and put a pit of dread in your stomach.

As you ruminated on the noise and tried to wrest it from your memory, a figure appeared around a corner ahead and you ground to a halt, scrambling to find a pathway to turn down so you could evade them. Right when you were preparing to flee, a spark of recognition hit you and bolted you to the ground.

You would know the Mandalorian’s gait anywhere. There he was, a life raft clad in beskar. You were immediately distrustful of your own mind.

“The path is clear behind me if you hurry,” he said, barreling down the hall with no intent to stop. His distant, detached tone cut you. “Take a lef—”

He froze mid-stride when he was in arm’s reach, and you realized that he hadn’t recognized you until now.

“ _Mar’e_ ,” he breathed, and embraced you. He dropped something—a long stick—and it clattered to the ground with a resounding clang. You went rigid with pain and with disbelief; you were _sure_ this was a trick of the IT-O’s chemical injections, and you absolutely refused to give them the pleasure of seeing you hopeful.

He raised his hand to your face, fingers stretched to touch your skin. “ _Trac’ika_ , what have they _done_ to you?” he asked, laying the gentlest brush of a single finger along your bruised cheek. It brought to mind the moment your interrogator had touched your battered face so reverently before he began his own round of “ _questioning_ ,” and you flinched away, squeezing your eyes tightly against the lurch in your gut and the blow that you expected to follow.

The Mandalorian pulled back his touch as if burned.

“Get me out of here,” you whispered, pleading. “I already know you won’t, I know this isn’t real, but please. Even a dream of escape would be enough.”

“I’m here,” he said, crouching down to meet your eyes once you opened them. “It’s Din. You’re awake, and you’re safe, and I can get you out of here, but we have to move. Can you run?”

You nodded, eyes on the floor. He picked up the stick—you saw now that it was a metal staff or spear—and he turned to lead you back the way he came. Your mother’s bag was slung over his shoulder, its contents clanking within, and a question rose in you but you kept your focus locked on the embroidered pattern in the fabric rather than voicing it. Through one turn after another, you followed blindly, not raising your eyes, not wanting to see another inch of this ship. The sharp, sour noise burrowed into your consciousness, and you wrenched your every bit of focus onto the bag’s needlework to try and deafen yourself to it.

Abruptly, the Mandalorian grabbed your injured hand to change your direction; you slapped your good hand to your mouth to muffle the scream it elicited from you. He dropped you from his grip and stepped back, unsure of whether to comfort you or keep his distance. Slowly, tenderly, he took your wrist in his grasp and overturned your hand to look at your palm, then seethed loudly through his modulator, nearly a growl. He drew his gaze up your arm, across your chest, down your other arm, and up to your face. Your body was a roadmap of mistreatment and misfortune, and he traced every path of it along the skin he could see. He was wondering what horrors lay where he couldn’t see them, you could read it on him clear as day.

“Straight down this corridor until the last right,” he said, now cold. “Go ‘til you find the cargo bay and get off the ship. It’s not far. The path should still be empty; take this just in case.” He held out a blaster to you, and you stared at it blankly.

You shook your head for a handful of seconds before words would finally leave you. “I can’t,” you said. “Just come with me.” You grabbed his arm and tugged, but he was still as stone.

“I’ll meet you outside,” he said, as if you hadn’t spoken. “There’s an outcropping of rocks at the edge of the forest that looks like a pyramid. Wait for me there. Do you think you can take your bag?”

“I can’t, I—what if they catch me? I’ll—” You hated how high and desperate your voice was. He passed you your bag and you slung it onto a shoulder, your composure shattered into too many pieces for you to put your thoughts to words.

“I am going to find every last Imperial piece of shit on this ship, and I am going to kill them all. Enough. It’s enough.” He obviously wasn’t hearing you anymore. He turned and stalked away from you, leaving you alone with the grating noise and your panic, and you suddenly recognized the sound.

Your dream. You looked around, listened closely, and felt like a fool for taking so long to put it together. This was the scene from your dream. Without choosing to, you dashed down the passageway after the Mandalorian, calling to him, imploring him to listen to you, powerless to stop what would come next.

You sprinted forward and reached with your good hand to turn him around with a grasp on his elbow. He spun, but jerked his arm free from your grip, vibrating with a rage and hatred you had seen on him a hundred times. You winced backward and put your hands up in the same surrendering gesture you always had, and stepped into his path just like you knew you would.

No. You refused to play this out. Instead of speaking, you remained silent, but stayed in his way.

“Don’t,” he growled, as he always did in your vision. It was as hate-filled as you remembered, and it put that familiar lump in your throat and spurred your heart to a dread-laden gallop. “Nothing you could say to me right now is going to change my mind. Stand aside or I will move you.”

“I will not leave without you,” you said, summoning a single shred of regrown gumption and defying your vision. You met his gaze for the first time. “So go ahead and move me if you have to, go chase down your death. But I will stand right here when you walk away, and your obsession with revenge will kill us both.”

“They don’t deserve to live,” he said. “All they do is cause pain. Over and over.”

“They _don’t_ deserve to live,” you agreed. Your lip trembled like a child’s as your composure ran dry. “But we do. Please, Din. Take me out of here.”

He looked at you, beaten and bloodied, your body a mosaic of maltreatment. Your hair was wild and uncovered—they hadn’t even afforded you the small dignity of a headscarf, of course they hadn’t—but some part of you was coming back to yourself. Some part of you had begun to hope that freedom was a real possibility, but you would not take it alone.

You offered your good hand to him and waited. “This is a helmet versus head moment,” you said after a second or two. “Who do you want to be?”

His shoulders visibly relaxed when he took your hand. “You’ve been through enough,” he said. “I won’t add to it. Let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I know, the kid probably couldn't see the explosion, but I do what I want.


	19. Tonic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A tending of wounds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As with last chapter, discussions of wounds and bruises. Nothing graphic. More mental anguish than physical.
> 
> Glossary  
> Shabuir: like "jackass" or "fuckup"  
> Nu draar: "absolutely not," emphatic rejection using a double negative  
> Gedet'ye: "please," "I'm begging you"

“The kid,” you panted as soon as you broke into the tree line and out of sight of the prison ship. You ground to a halt and rested your back against a trunk. “Did you get him back? You were—” Fuck, you _could not_ catch your breath. Your body must’ve been more deconditioned than you had realized. You groaned aloud and continued, “You were stranded, and they got him. Is he okay? Did he tell you where I was?”

“He’s fine, he’s— Wait, how would _he_ know where you— But, you… How did _you_ …?” he said, tripping over fifteen thoughts at once.

Good to see you weren’t the only one whose brain was scrambled.

“Hang on, so how _did_ you know where I was?” you asked as your brain unscrambled first.

“Funny story,” he said. You doubted it.

He produced something from his hip pocket, but seemed to change his mind about showing it to you. Instead, he just looked at the item lying in his hand.

You were almost afraid to look, but you heaved yourself off the tree trunk and peered into his palm.

“Oh, you have got to be _shitting me._ ”

In his hand was a small black box with a v-shaped antenna and a little red indicator light in its center, blinking wildly. Indignation was familiar territory and you found yourself slipping into a bit of your old self for a moment.

“It’s not what it looks like,” he quipped.

“Well, thank the Maker for that,” you fired back, miming a sarcastic swipe of your brow. “‘Cause for a second there I thought some Wookiee-fucking _shabuir_ massively violated my privacy and trust by _implanting a tracking device inside my body_. How the hell did you even do that, you creep! Where is it? And fuckin’ WHY!”

“I implanted it inside your _boot,”_ he said. He displayed the fob to you and waved it over the bag containing your belongings; the indicator light blinked frantically. Then he walked away from the bag and waved it up and down your body; the blinking slowed. “The tracker led me to your _boots_ , in a storage room on an Imperial ship that was docked on Concordia. I passed by on another Imperial vessel and got close enough for the fob to pick up the signal. From there, I had to find you on my own. But then you _set a fire in your prison cell_ , which made you pretty easy to locate. Way to live up to the nickname.”

“Do not be fucking cute with me,” you said. “I am _pissed_ at you. You—“

He stepped in close to you, making you tilt your head up to look at him. “You just go ahead and be pissed, then,” he said, his tone edgy but matter-of-fact. That same weird humming sound from the prison ship picked up again. “Pissed means you’re alive, _trac’ika,_ and that’s all I care about. I’d rather have you pissed than dead or worse. You being ‘pissed,’ I can handle. Hell, ‘pissed,’ I am _used to_.”

He heaved a sigh and settled himself, seeming to shrink in height.

“Sometimes an honorable path is paved with occasional dishonorable deeds,” he continued. “It was an honorable intention to want to protect you. To want to be able to find you if someone took you from me. But it was dishonorable to do it without your permission. I apologize for the means, but I do not regret the ends.”

“Don’t use your spooky, over-articulate Mando voice on me, pal,” you said, your anger losing steam to his sincerity. “I’m not your Armorer”—you pointed a finger at his chest and then down at the bag containing your boots—“and I’m not your fuckin’ quarry. Do not treat me like prey.”

“If I treat you like prey, you’ll know.”

“Ain’t gotta threaten _me_ with a good time,” you mumbled, bumping past him and stomping into the forest.

The last ember of your temper faded out as you plodded through the forest, and a few minutes later, he caught up to you and you muttered, “I’m sorry I called you a _shabuir_.”

“No hard feelings,” he said.

“And a Wookiee-fucker,” you added.

“Everybody’s got a past,” he said with a shrug.

It had been so long since you’d laughed that it caught you by surprise to hear the sound burst out of you, and the chuckle got stuck halfway out of your throat. A wave of guilt and doubt washed over you. How could you be arguing and laughing— _laughing!_ —when less than a day ago, you’d been getting tortured by the goddamn Galactic Empire? Maybe it _hadn’t_ been torture. Torture was the kind of thing people didn’t come back from, right? Tortured people didn’t say things like “Wookiee-fucker.” Victims of torture didn’t _laugh_.

“Here,” the Mandalorian said some time later, shaking you from your thoughts by stopping to sling the bag off his shoulder and rifle through its contents. “Hub’s just through there. You’ve got to get out of that uniform.”

He handed you your tunic and pants along with the guilty boots, then turned his back so you could dress.

“You said we’re on Concordia?” you asked, doing your best to change quickly.

“Yeah,” he said.

“What were you doing on an Imperial ship flying by Concordia?” You grunted when you lifted your wounded leg into the trousers, then weakly shimmied them on.

“It was…hijacked, I guess. I was traveling with someone who was taking it to Mandalore,” he said. “When the tracking fob activated, I took a ship from the cruiser’s hangar and… here I am.”

“Seems a shame to be so close to Mandalore and leave without seeing it,” you said, brushing the leaves and dirt from your feet and slipping the boots on. You’d never admit it, but you pressed your hand to the sole of each one and thanked it for your rescue.

“That place is cursed anyway,” he said. “We’ve got enough problems.”

When you were clothed, you shoved your discarded uniform into the hollow of a tree, then stuffed it with leaves. With that done, you turned back to face the Mandalorian and found him cradling your helmet in his hands, staring down at it.

“My mother’s,” you said.

He shook his head. “Yours.”

He held it out for you to take and you furrowed your brow in question but took it from his hands. Now was not the time for sentimental jibber-jabber; you had to get the hell off this moon before the noose closed around you. You looked at it for a second and then moved to put it back into the bag, but he grabbed your wrist and stopped you.

“Your face is—” he began. “Uh… You should wear it for now. Your face will draw attention.”

You gawped at him for a second and then lowered your head, remembering to be self-conscious about your appearance. “Won’t wandering around in a helmet do the same?”

“So throw on the rest of it,” he said, gesturing at the bag full of beskar. “We’re on _Concordia_ , Mandalorian armor isn’t that out of place here.”

You groaned but complied, initially waving off his help, but accepting it after struggling with the chest and back plates for a full minute.

“I look like a piece of Jawa salvage,” you said when the job was done.

“ _Nu draar,_ ” he hushed you, taking a step closer. “You look like a warrior. You look like you were always meant to look.”

You felt like a child playing dress-up. You felt like a phony.

* * *

Once you cleared the forest and reached the transport hub, the two of you “borrowed” a short-range mining transport; the Mandalorian thought it would be too risky to return to the small Imperial ship he’d come in on. He flew the two of you halfway around the moon, landed in what would someday be a regrown forest, and you made your way to the larger spaceport. Your faked identicards helped you get yourselves onto a longer-range ship that would make a stop on Bandomeer, getting you out of the hot seat to regroup.

The doors hissed closed, the passenger compartment pressurized, and once the engines hummed to life and bore you off the surface, a small, brittle safety cocooned around you, providing the barest hint of a foothold, and that was all you needed to completely come undone. You slumped your shoulders against the wall and your knees decided that the floor was where you should be, deflating you to the deck. The Mandalorian watched you for a second and then joined you on the ground.

“I missed you on Harvest Day,” you muttered.

You said it like a sleepwalker, like you’d been hypnotized and left under. It was only honest in the most technical sense; you never had any idea what exact day it was during your imprisonment, but you had missed him desperately every single day, so while you hadn’t missed him specifically on Harvest Day, you guessed it must’ve still been true.

At any rate, forming those five words was all the confession you found yourself capable of, and you stared at the floor with unfocused eyes, grateful for the helmet.

“I missed you on Harvest Day, too,” he said. He touched his shoulder to yours, an anchor in the storm, and pent-up tears began to stream freely now that you were safe enough to let yourself be blinded by them.

Much of the trip to Bandomeer passed that way; you kept your eyes on the deck and wept in the silent, blind privacy of your helmet. You didn’t say another word until you disembarked the ship and headed to the nearest lodgings, stopping at a market stall for food along the way.

“Where do you want to go from here?” the Mandalorian asked you. Bandomeer was right on the Hydian Way hyperspace route, opening much of the galaxy to you for the price of a ticket.

You shook your head, unable to think of a single planet or even a star system beyond the one you were in.

“I hear Lothal is peaceful,” he suggested. “Darkknell’s got three suns; take that, Tatooine.”

“Tatooine,” you said, as if waking from sleep. “We were supposed to meet in Mos Eisley. Let’s go to Tatooine.”

“Are you sure?” he asked. “We don’t have to decide right now.”

You nodded. “I miss Tatooine.”

That put paid to it. “Tatooine it is,” he said. “You said you had a friend there?”

“Yeah. I hope so.”

He stopped in front of a door, waved an identicard in front of it and shouldered it open, then tossed your knapsack on the bed within. The room was small, but it was bright and it smelled clean. You slumped inside and deposited the parcels he’d handed you onto the little table and stood stiffly in your armor, awaiting instruction.

Unburdened, he turned to you. “I’m going to go get… There are a few supplies I need before the next leg of our trip,” he said, crouching down to try and look from his visor into yours. “You’re safe here; no one knows who we are, and the door will be locked. Eat or sleep or scrub that ship off of you or just… sit here and rest. Whatever you want to do. I will be right back.”

Then he was gone, and the room grew colder and smaller and dimmer.

You stood in the silence and considered curling up into a ball and disappearing under the blankets, but caught a whiff of your sour skin juxtaposed against the bright smell of the room and decided you ought to get cleaned up first. After painstakingly removing your armor—emphasis on the “pain”— you stepped into the fresher. Bandomeer is half ocean, half landmass, so the shower was water, rather than sonic. You undressed—an agony all its own—then put your clothes in the sonic scrubber to be cleaned and stepped under the spray. At first, the water was only tepid, but you cranked up the temperature more and more until the room filled with steam and your skin took on a deep flush.

A noise in the other room brought you back to yourself and you looked down at your fingertips and found them wrinkled. Unsure of how long you’d been zoning out under the water, you quickly washed your skin and turned off the shower. The mirror was fogged over, and you spared a moment’s gratitude that you wouldn’t have to see your battered skin as you dressed. You wrapped a towel around your hair and put on your cleaned clothes mostly one-handed, then exited the fresher, bringing a cloud of steam with you.

Your focus landed square on the Mandalorian’s bare face, looking down at the meal in front of him, and you clapped your unhurt hand over your eyes and blurted, “Fuck’s sake!” Heart racing so loud you almost couldn’t hear him bustling toward you, you stammered on. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t see—”

He shushed you and lifted your hand from your eyes. “Listen, _trac’ika_ , shh,” he said, brushing a bare thumb along your creased brow. “It’s okay. Open your eyes.”

You shook your head and bowed it toward the floor, your eyes still squeezed tight. The towel tumbled from your head and landed at your feet. “No, it was an accident, it doesn’t count,” you pleaded. “It’s fine, you can—"

“It wasn’t an accident,” he said, grazing a calming touch up and down both your arms. You noticed the faint, familiar, off-kilter humming again and tuned into it. When you didn’t look up, he squeezed your elbows lightly and continued, “I want to see you with my own eyes, without the helmet between us. Please, look at me.”

You burned to see his face—really _see_ him this time, not just a glance—but part of you remained frozen with a fear you couldn’t name.

“ _Gedet’ye, trac’ika,_ ” he whispered like a prayer. You remembered his words that night on the Razor Crest—" _when you thought I was going to take it off, you looked away_ ”—and realized your fear must be feeding his own.

With your heart fluttering in its cage, you opened your eyes and raised your head.

Maker, he was _beautiful_. A laughed huff of disbelief bubbled out of you and you cursed the tears that pooled in your eyes for obscuring your vision. “I knew you’d have brown eyes,” was all you could think to say that wasn’t outright worshipful.

His dark brows were drawn together with emotion, and his eyes crinkled at the corners as he smiled. A handful of silver strands shone at his temples. All of his features were generously sculpted—full lips and a bold nose, round cheeks and a square jaw—and it shouldn’t have worked, it should’ve been too much, but it wasn’t.

You raised your hand to touch his face but abandoned the gesture partway through amid a wave of self-consciousness. He caught your hand and pressed it to his cheek, closing his eyes and leaning into the touch. The coarse stubble on his jaw prickled into your palm and something about it felt electric.

An image flashed across his skin and into you: the Child in the Mandalorian’s arms, touching his face just like you were. “He got to see your face, too,” you whispered. Your vision blurred again with tears.

The Mandalorian opened his eyes and looked down at you as if trying to solve a puzzle. His gaze softened and he removed your hand from his face, pressed a kiss to the flat of your hand, and released you. “How did you know that?” he asked, pure curiosity in his voice. “You said something earlier, too—asked me if I’d ‘gotten him back.’”

The swarm of butterflies in your stomach followed him to the small table and sat you down. You groaned with the effort of lowering yourself to the chair, every inch of muscle and bone and skin sending pain signals through you.

You shook your head, picking at your fingertips to avoid staring. “I was on the prison ship, and the kid and I just kind of…connected. Felt like he was searching for something. It was… I was experiencing things _through_ him, I guess? Through his senses, maybe. I heard your voice—asking him to hurry, saying you’d buy him time—and then I saw the Razor Crest get blown up, felt him freak out when a squad of armored soldiers scooped him up and flew away. I don’t know, I’ve never had anything like that happen before. But he never reached out to me again.”

“I took him to some—” he hesitated a second before continuing. “Magic rock?”

You looked up from your hands; the Mandalorian was leaning toward you, his forearms resting on the table, one hand pushing his drink back and forth in a small arc across the surface. “Searching Stone, Seeking Stone, something like that,” he said with a wave of his hand. “It was supposed to help him find a Jedi.”

“Maybe because we’d kind of had those little moments of connection before, he was able to find me?” you said. “There was another consciousness in there toward the end, though. I wonder if that was the Jedi. I didn’t see a face, only felt them through the—I don’t know, the Force, I guess. All this stuff sounds so crazy.”

The two of you picked at the food in front of you, neither of you seeming to have much appetite.

“Can I ask you a question?” you asked after a time.

He dipped his chin once without breaking eye contact.

“What made you decide to show your face? To the kid, to me,” you said, matching his forward lean, but cradling your bad hand against your belly. Looking into his eyes, straining not to scan over his face over and over, was derailing your thoughts, so you looked back down to the table. “Not that I’m not… Not that _you’re_ not… I mean—”

He laughed then, and you snapped your eyes up to see. There was no cruelty or malice in it at all; he was laughing at your being flustered, not _at you_. The sight and sound made you grin so hard it sent a sharp zap of pain from your split lip to your chin to your temple and around the back of your head. You winced and flattened your hand against the curve of your jaw, humming a moan that sounded pathetic even to you.

Before you could reopen your eyes, the Mandalorian was on his feet, muttering apologies. “Here, come here, I got you some bacta,” he said, pulling your chair across the floor to the corner of the bed. He perched on the edge of the mattress and pried open a tube of the salve, dispensed a blob of it into his hand, and rubbed it between his palms. “Can I?” he asked, holding his goop-coated fingers up to you. You nodded, and with a feather-light touch, he smeared the warm balm into your skin.

“I found some other Mandalorians,” he said, smoothing a fingertip over the gash in your cheek. “They told me I was wrong, that I grew up in a cult; that ‘normal Mandalorians’ took their helmets off all the time. I don’t know.”

“The notion of a ‘normal Mandalorian’ seems insane to me,” you said, trying to ignore the gooseflesh that erupted along your arms and legs in response to his touch. “But I guess I only have a sample size of two, and neither of you really had the luxury of being ‘normal.’” You shrugged. “Did you try telling them to fuck themselves?”

He snorted, then cleared his throat. “I did, actually,” he said. “But then, to rescue the kid… It became necessary. And after that, after everything—" He searched for words and his eyes shone with emotion. “I just wanted him to see me, to know my face before he was gone.”

The Mandalorian dabbed the tip of his forefinger against the bacta in his palm, then touched his un-salved pinkie finger to his top lip, mirroring where yours was split. “Can I?” he asked again. You nodded and parted your lips so he could apply the balm. His touch was so light that it tickled fiercely, and when he pulled back his hand, you pressed your lips together to stop them tingling.

“He looked at you like you were a miracle,” you said. You had felt the same way; you wondered if it had shown in your eyes like it had the Child’s. “It’s fitting that, after you spent so long looking after him, acting as his father… He’s part of your clan, your Armorer even said so; and you said you’re allowed to remove your helmet in front of family.”

“I did,” he said, brown eyes lingering on yours.

Almost your whole face was alight with the warm, buzzy feeling of the bacta. A dull hum vibrated in the silence hovering between you as he focused his attention on a large bruise across the side and back of your neck that disappeared underneath your tunic. He picked up the tube of ointment and dispensed another bead into his palm.

“Feels like an excuse though,” he said. “Justifying it after the fact, trying to duck the consequences of what I chose to do.”

His touch came to the edge of your collar. “Can I?” he repeated, pointing at your shoulder. As before, you nodded, then tilted your head away and stretched your neck to give him space to work. His fingers slipped beneath the fabric of your shirt and you curled your toes to avoid shivering at the sensation.

“It was—” he began, stopping his work and looking into the middle distance for a second before bringing his focus back to your neck. “This whole time, I’d been feeling this urge to be seen and I’d been feeling bad for it and then it turns out... It means nothing. It was all made up.”

You almost scowled, but you smoothed it out in time.

“That link you have with your culture, with your identity, your religion—it’s like a keystone, right?” you said. “Forsaking it at the word of someone else… That’s not _you_. Just be you. Look how wonderful you are, how kind and loyal and strong and fair. Just be you. And if someone doesn’t like it, fuck ‘em. They’re not as good as you.”

You took hold of his wrist with your good hand, focusing his attention on your words.

“So what if it was made up? Everything is made up, that doesn’t make it meaningless,” you said. “It meant a hell of a lot to you. It obviously still does. It sure means a hell of a lot to _me_ , seeing your face, even if you decide to never share it with me again.” You paused to take in his features anew. “’It means nothing?’ _Bullshit_. Your creed is a part of you, Din, it’s shaped this incredible person you’ve become—it led you to help strangers and to risk everything to protect someone helpless, because you knew he needed you, because you said you would do it—you don’t have to give that up just because someone else says it’s not part of _their_ creed.”

He studied you in silence, his eyes lingering on every curve of your face as if to commit it to memory. Your every nerve ending stood at attention as he traced his fingers up your arm, across your shoulder, along your neck, then curved them around your nape. He watched your expression as he touched you, his movements slow and intentional. Your pulse bucked in your throat and your core as he bowed closer to you, pausing with your lips a whisper apart.

“Can I?” he breathed.

Your body answered on its own and closed the space between you. He touched his lips to yours, so gentle it made you ache, and one of you hummed low and soft and urgent. You dragged your fingernails over his flank and grabbed a handful of the fabric between plates of armor. His grip fluttered a little tighter at the back of your neck for a mere second and he brought his other hand to your upper arm, his every touch so light and reverent you were sure he was afraid of hurting you. Too soon, his lips left yours and he rested his forehead against your brow and held his eyes closed, hands cradling your face as your flickering heart left you breathless.

He muttered a prayer in Mando’a, thanking the kings in the stars for blessings long-awaited, to which you added a silent agreement while feeling awkward about the praise.

As he pulled away, you raised your head and placed a careful kiss among the silver strands at his temple, then skimmed your lips along the arch of his cheek.

The Mandalorian lifted his chin and tightened his grip on your arm, bringing his lips back within an inch of yours. “If I kiss you again…” he whispered the warning against your mouth, then rumbled a frustrated sound that lit a fire low in you. “You’re too hurt for me to kiss you again.”

The implication of his words made your core flare with desire and you tightened your fist around the fabric of his shirt to pull him closer, but he stood and blew out a breath.

He pointed the tube of bacta at you and wagged it up and down, shaking his head, warring with himself. “Too hurt,” he muttered. He crossed the room and rested his hip against the wall, as far out of reach as the small space would allow.

“I’m not that hurt,” you said with an attempt at a coy smile. It was a lie, but you burned for it to be true. Your skin grew colder without his to warm you.

“I’ve got the taste of bacta on my tongue, _trac’ika_ , don’t tell me you’re not hurt,” he said.

He took a few paces across the room and held up the healing ointment. “Let’s get you fixed up the rest of the way for now,” he said.

He patted the chair and beckoned you over with a jerk of his head. You fumbled with your shirt, trying to unbutton it with your non-dominant hand and a bundle of nerves slowing your progress.

“This is hard to watch,” the Mandalorian said after a few moments, squinting at your spectacle, pretending to be in pain.

“Really? ‘Cause it _feels_ great,” you riposted, but your heart wasn’t in it.

“Hush,” he said. He fluttered his hand over yours to get you to pull them out of the way, then easily undid the buttons, making you nervous all over again. You shrugged out of the tunic with some assistance, and once you were sitting there in your undershirt, the Mandalorian quailed at the sight of you and leaned forward to put his face in his hands, muttering angry blasphemy in his adopted tongue.

The uniform shirt you’d been wearing when he found you had covered most of your arms and chest, and then your tunic had concealed everything from the neck down. In just a camisole, though, none of the physical pain you’d endured could go unimagined. You peered down to see what he saw, realizing for the first time that you’d been studiously avoiding looking at yourself since your escape.

Your body bore countless constellations of cuts and bruises in various stages of healing. A few you had names for—getting flung halfway to hell by the exploding field generator had kicked your chestplate into your skin, spilling a thick, inky bruise across your front that was now faded to a putrid yellow-green—but most of them were a blur or a void, and you didn’t feel particularly compelled to dig around in your memory for their exact origins.

You returned your attention to the Mandalorian, who looked up at you like a twist of a knife. Pity was painted in such thick lines across his face that you couldn’t stand it, so you moved to flee.

“It’s fine, I’ll—” you stammered. “I can…I’ll just do it.” You started to stand to scurry back to the fresher, but he pressed a hand down on your knee.

“Stay, _trac’ika_. Let me help,” he pleaded.

“I can’t, uh—" you said, clearing your throat against the lump that had risen in it. “I can’t deal with pity right now, Din, I have too many fragments to hold together.”

You got to your feet and left the room, then sat on the floor so you could avoid seeing your reflection in the mirror. You applied the healing balm to the worst of your injuries and wept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter is the last.


	20. Diminuendo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Journey's end.

You slept like a stone, not waking once in the night. A beam of morning light shone around the edge of the curtain and landed in your eyes, waking you slowly. As consciousness dawned within you, you became aware that your arm was a void of movement and sensation stretching from your biceps to fingertips. Your eyes snapped open, alarmed that something must’ve gone wrong with the bacta application on your injured hand and now your arm was— _oh_.

When your eyes focused into the space between the blinding sunbeam and the otherwise-dim break of day, you found yourself clinging to the Mandalorian like a life preserver. He was sound asleep on his stomach and your arms were wrapped around one of his, the weight of his shoulder pinching a nerve and deadening your limb. He used his free arm as a pillow, forehead nestled into the bend of his elbow and fingers resting in a gentle curve at the edge of your puddled hair.

Dual impulses battled in you, the urge to move your sleeping limb (and spare yourself the embarrassment of being found tangled up around him) fighting with the desire to remain still—to relish in the proximity and let him rest. As you lay frozen with indecision, the agony of numbness mounted in your arm and reached a point where you _had_ to move it. You were gonna do it, you just had to psych yourself up for a second first.

“You look like yourself again this morning,” the Mandalorian said, sleep roughening the edges of his voice. He took a deep breath and buried his face in the crook of his arm to yawn. “How do you feel?”

You’d been so focused on your thoughts that you hadn’t noticed him wake. You tried to move to sit up, to release your hold on him, but your arm didn’t respond when you tried to raise yourself onto your elbow, so you mostly just flopped ineffectually and tried to coordinate your movement.

The Mandalorian pressed the fingertips of his free hand against your shoulder and the other against your knee, settling you. “Shh,” he said. “After twelve hours, I think we can both endure five more minutes of you drooling on me.”

“’Twelve hours!’ What do you mean ‘twelve hours?’” you asked, swiping your cheek with your shoulder and finding it dry, thank the Maker. You fidgeted to shift some of his weight off your upper arm.

“Just a guess,” he said, then raised his head to peek at the timekeeper on the wall. “Yeah. Twelve hours. You were tired. Bacta needs time to work.”

“Oh, I thought you meant I’d been sleeping _on you_ for twelve hours,” you said. You still weren’t sure why you were sleeping on him at all. You’d gone to sleep in an empty bed. It wasn’t that you expected him to sleep on the floor, exactly; it was more that…he always _had_.

“Nah,” he said. Relief washed over you until he added, “’Bout eleven and a half.”

“What!” You pulled your face back further from his, sending a waking ache down your arm as sensation began to stir within it.

“You passed out the second your head hit the pillow, but a few minutes later you started talking in your sleep,” he said. “No big deal at first, but after a while, you got…you seemed…I decided to try and wake you up.”

You wondered what he meant but had no recollection of any dreams.

“When I called your name, you didn’t stir,” he continued. “So I sat next to you on the bed to try and nudge you awake. You grabbed my arm and wouldn’t let go.”

“Din, you are nearly a foot taller than me, and you beat asses for a living,” you said. There was no way he was overpowered by you, especially in the state you were in.

“I _hunt_ for a living,” he said. “The ass-beating is a last resort. I get mine kicked too often.” He looked at you a moment, eyes scanning over your face. “When you grabbed ahold of me, you settled down. So I just laid next to you and let you sleep.”

He shrugged the shoulder closest to you, jostling your arm as it woke, and you cried out a groan that was half laugh, half agony.

“Hold still, hold still, hold still,” you babbled. “My arm is asleep.”

“I thought you wanted to get up,” he teased, and moved a tiny fraction. You let out another whining chuckle and clamped your good arm around his like a vise to pin him in place.

“Mean,” you said. “You’re a mean man.”

He planted a quick kiss on your forehead that sent tingles down your scalp. “You have no idea,” he said.

As he withdrew, you raised your chin a fraction involuntarily, tipping your lips toward his. He lingered, looking at your mostly-healed face, then lowered his lips to yours. What began as a fairly chaste embrace quickly deepened, the Mandalorian gripping the back of your neck to hold you close. You parted your lips and felt his honey-sweet tongue slide between them, dancing with your own.

You spared half a moment’s thought to be self-conscious of what your breath must’ve been like that morning, but he tightened his fist in your hair and the thought was forgotten. You hummed a moan and drew your body up around his other arm, still in your grasp. He groaned then pulled away, leaving you both panting and frustrated.

“You need more time,” he said, then kissed your forehead again and moved to stand.

“Din, I feel fine,” you smiled and tightened your hold on him. “The bacta helped a lot.”

He shook his head. “No, there are some things bacta doesn’t fix,” he said, then cradled your face in his hands. “I get it—the impulse to do something _alive_ after an experience like yours, but… Some of the things you were saying in your sleep… Just take some time, _trac’ika_. For me.”

Once more, he looked at you. You drifted closer to him as if magnetized, then pressed your lips to his, soft as a prayer. The instant you began to deepen the kiss, the Mandalorian took to his feet for good. He crossed the room and pressed his back to the wall, same as he had done the previous day, but there was no conflict in him now.

He was right, but what did _that_ matter? What did it matter if part of what you wanted was a distraction, some proof of life after coming so close to death? Your body had hurt so much for so long, what was wrong with wanting to know it could feel good again?

On the other side of it, though, you considered how you’d feel if the tables were turned: you’d feel like you were not only taking advantage of him in an unstable state, but being used by him as a distraction in the process. Neither would feel good. It would cheapen things, maybe forever. What you felt for Din wasn’t cheap, and the thought of the Empire’s hands poisoning even one more thing made you so disgusted you could’ve spat on the floor.

But there are many life-affirming things in such a big galaxy, and you could trade in one for another and feel almost as alive. Mischief, one of your greatest pleasures, crackled along your skin, and you rose to your feet to seek a different kind of satisfaction. If he was gonna leave you frustrated—even with good reason—you were damn sure gonna see to it that you had company.

You crossed the room to take up the tube of bacta from the dining table. Just before your fingers closed around it, the Mandalorian snapped it up.

“Are you still hurt?” he asked, suspicious of you.

You held up your hand, which you’d coated in the healing balm a few times the previous day, but still looked like shit and barely functioned. “It doesn’t hurt as much, but it doesn’t seem like it’s healing either,” you said. 

He hummed a dissatisfied noise and took your hand in his to look at it. “This might need a bacta soak,” he said. “Wiggle your fingers?” You tried, but the movement was weak. “Yeah, we should try a soak.” He leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest.

“Well, if you’re going back to nurse mode, I have a few other wounds I couldn’t get to that need tending,” you said. He narrowed his eyes but crooked a finger to beckon you forward. You perched on the edge of the table and put your foot in the chair, penning him against the wall, then hiked up the leg of your trousers to reveal—

“Is that a _blaster wound?_ ” the Mandalorian asked, entirely back to business. _Whoops_. Shouldn’t have led with that one. “This is recent; you said you’d been there for weeks. Did they shoot you after they’d already captured you? That could have blown your leg off.”

“Oh, no, this is from my first escape attempt,” you said. You could have reached it yourself, actually, but you’d kind of forgotten it in the tsuris of the previous evening. “Went pretty well at first—I got four of them before they stunned me. You know how it is; no honor among fascists.”

He raised an eyebrow and appraised you, then moved to smooth the angry red swath with ointment. When he bent forward, you bowed over him, pretending to observe what he was doing. As he straightened, his shoulder grazed against you and he looked at you with a pretend scowl.

The scowl deepened when you lifted your shirts to expose a bruise along your ribcage.

“What? I couldn’t reach with my good hand, and my bad one doesn’t work,” you said, wide-eyed and coy, like you weren’t just trying to get him to touch your skin. Neither of you was fooled. It was true you couldn’t reach, and there really were probably a couple cracked ribs there, but they were not your current motivation.

“This bacta is going to have you good as new in a couple days,” he cautioned you as he applied the balm along your bruised flank with a feather-gentle pressure that you felt all the way into your throbbing core. His gossamer touch drifted down your side and hardened at your unblemished hip. He leaned into the crook of your neck and with a deep rumble in his voice, breathed, “I am a very patient man with a very long memory.”

_Maker, I sure as shit hope so._

* * *

Later that day, you were sitting at the small table while the Mandalorian regaled you with the story of his quest to find Grogu a Jedi. Out of nowhere, he dropped a name that made your gut feel like it got jammed into the wrong gear: _Bo-Katan Kryze_.

“You’re shitting me,” you said, nearly spilling the small bacta bath your hand was soaking in on the tabletop. “How did you end up rubbing elbows with Bo-Katan fucking Kryze? Like, of all the countless billions in the galaxy, what are the o—”

“Friend of yours?” he asked in a tone that made it clear he knew she was not.

“As close to the opposite of friends as you can be with someone you’ve never actually met,” you said. “What the hell were you doing with _Lady Bo_?”

“I was looking for other Mandalorians to help me get the kid to a Jedi,” he said. You knew that was the plan, but _fuck_. “How do you know Bo-Katan?”

“And _that_ was the best you could come up with?” you asked, picking at the scattering of food in front of you. “Did she even help you?”

He took a drink before he continued. “She kind of tricked me into helping her hijack an Imperial freighter so she could commandeer a bunch of weapons to help her retake Mandalore and I ended up having to jump out of it before it left atmo, but I guess, yeah. She kept her word, pointed me toward a Jedi.”

“Maker’s sake, with the ‘rightful leader of Mandalore’ shit, still? Third time’s the charm, is it, Bo?” you muttered. One-note song, that broad. “So are you going to get together again?”

“Already did. She helped me rescue the kid,” he said. You made a note to rewind to this part in a second, but the thought of her being anywhere near the foundling made you viscerally angry, and you spent a moment hoping that he barfed on her boots or magic-handed her hair gray or something. Shit, old as she was, it was probably gray already. The thought brought you a petty sprinkle of joy.

You wrested your focus away from Bo-Katan and back to the story the Mandalorian was telling. “That’s whose Imperial ship you were on when you found me?” you asked, draining the last of your drink and making the deliberate choice not to clank the cup down onto the table.

“Different stolen Imperial ship, actually, but yeah,” he said. He picked a piece of meat from the container in front of you, rolled it in a spicy sauce, and put it in his mouth.

Oh, cool, they’d stolen _two_ ships together. How exciting for Lady Bo.

“Hmm. So you guys are gonna, what, _team up_ on her bid to retake Mandalore?” Din didn’t strike you as the second-fiddle type, but also—

“I’m not really into politics,” he said. Exactly; he was more a man of deeds than words. He stood to refill your glass from the cycler and added, “Also: wasn’t kidding about that planet being cursed.”

You opened your mouth to speak but he put the water down on the table and held a finger in front of your lips. “If you say anything other than how you know Bo-Katan, I am going to flick you.” He tucked his middle finger behind his thumb and aimed it at your upper arm.

“It’s not—shut up. I’m injured. It’s just that… mmm,” you tripped over your tongue. You withdrew your hand from the bacta and rubbed the fingers of your good hand against your bad. “Did you mention anything about me?”

“Am I usually chatty with strangers?” He was having _fun_ with this, the bastard, looming over you like some kind of stubble-faced obelisk.

“Good, yeah, excellent,” you said, dipping your hand back into the soak and bobbing your head so much you were apt to sprain a goddamn neck muscle. “Excellent. Because I am… Really, I’m not sure if she would want to, like, join forces or maybe just kill me. Neither of those sounds ideal.”

“What did you do?” There was no urgency in his tone, but you got defensive anyway.

“Why do you assume it’s something I did?! _You just said_ she was a wackadoo!” Your voice kinda creaked at the end there. Embarrassing.

He stared at you. You refused to look up at him to be sure, but you felt the weight of it pressing you against your chair.

“It’s fine, it’s not, like… personal. It’s— you know how men ruin everything? No offense,” you said. When he _mmm_ -ed in response, you kept going. “My mom’s father was a, like, crazy asshole, and he kind of…murdered Bo-Katan’s sister. But this was like 30 years ago, so she’s probably—"

“What?!” this time, it was _his_ voice that broke a little. Here we go, here was the table-turning moment you’d yearned for. He flattened his palms on the table to anchor himself against the things coming out of your mouth.

“Well, like… indirectly. It was his creepy magic blade, but not his _hand,”_ you said. “He set it in motion, sure, but I mean... he was already dead by the time it all shook out.” You took a gulp of water and cleared your throat. “It’s fine, Bo-Katan was in on it. At least, she was at first. Besides, she was a dick to my mom and she burned down the village I grew up in, so… maybe we’re just square? I dunno the etiquette here.”

“Wait.” He looked down at the table and raised his fingers off the surface.

“I don’t even know that she meant for her sister to get killed, but she _definitely_ wanted to stage a coup, even if she changed her mind halfway through it,” you said, your speech growing faster as you tried to blurt the whole story out at once. “And it’s not like she can blame me for any of it, I wasn’t even _born_. Plus, Granddad was _nuts_ , she must’ve known it was gonna end in bloodsh—“

“Wait, goddammit,” he said a little louder, shaking you from your rambling reverie. He rubbed the back of his neck and took a breath. “Sorry. Just… Let me catch up. Who is your grandfather?”

You sighed. When you were finished blowing it out, you didn’t feel ready to speak, so you sighed again.

“So, you’ve obviously heard of Death Watch,” you said, trying to keep your tone even. It wasn’t a question; you’d seen it in his memories. A member of Death Watch—albeit a different offshoot than your grandfather’s—pulled him from a cellar and flew him to safety the day his homeworld had fallen.

“Nope.” He shook his head and took a step back from the table.

“Yes, you _absolutely_ have! I don’t know h—“

“As in, ‘Nope, I’m no longer listening,’ because whatever you’re about to say is not going to be good,” he said, turning his back to you and walking further across the room. “I can hear it in your voice; you’re winding up for a sucker-punch.”

You scoffed and pressed on, doing exactly that. “This from a guy who’s chummy with the likes of Bo-Katan fucking Kryze,” you said, grimacing against her name like it tasted bad in your mouth. “Figured you’d’ve heard all about Death Watch from Granddad’s former second-in-command.”

“I’m not— wait, what? ‘Second-in-command’ of Death Watch,” He repeated. He was on his back foot and you were trying not to revel in it. “So your grandfather—” he said, his hands in the air as if to hold back your next words, “ _You’re Pre Vizsla’s granddaughter?_ ”

 _Pow_.

“Well, _was,_ ” you said, and laughed a little too long. You sobered up for a second and removed your hand from the liquid it was marinating in and looked at it. “Hey, can you overdose on bacta?”

He pointed at the dish and monotoned, “Put it back.” You could see the gears turning in his brain, trying to break this news up into something he could digest. "But, no, she couldn’t have been. Bo-Katan isn’t Death Watch, her group is called the Nite Owls."

"She can splinter-cell into whatever group she wants, dude, she was Death Watch when it counted. She’s still a terrorist,” you said, submerging your hand back into the healing liquid. “Calling a nexu cat a house pet doesn’t get rid of the teeth."

“That…does not seem like a good comparison,” he said, and you shrugged rather than beg to differ. Sounded like a perfect fucking comparison to you. Another thought occurred to the Mandalorian: “You said something about a ‘creepy magic blade?’”

“It’s not really magic, at least not any more than any other lightsaber; people just act like it is. But yeah,” you said, grabbing a bite of meat. “My… _many_ -greats grandfather Tarre was a Jedi. The first Mandalorian Jedi, actually. He made himself a lightsaber—like Jedis do—but he made it with a black kyber crystal, so the blade looks creepy as fuck. Or so they say.”

“No, it does,” the Mandalorian said. You squinted a question at him and he dipped his hand into the deep pocket at his thigh and produced a hand-length cylinder. That familiar low, eerie tune that you’d first noticed in your dream rose forth again and crescendoed. He pressed a button on the hilt and a blade-shaped void opened in the fabric of reality. Looking directly at it made you queasy in the back of your brain, and you winced against it.

“Ah, fuck,” you sighed, as though you might have known. “That’s where that sound’s been coming from. I see you were winding up for a sucker punch of your own.” You shook your head as he feigned innocence. “You know, for someone who’s always talking about _Mandalore_ being cursed, I’m surprised you want to carry that hunk of horror in your pocket.”

You got up from the table and went to sit on the bed, the tiny shred of your appetite having disappeared entirely at the sight of the Darksaber. The dish of bacta balancing in your lap, you settled against the pillows and tried to make sense of the sight before you.

The Mandalorian waved the saber back and forth, causing a buzz like a swarm of flies to fill the room, and it gnawed a pit of dizziness and dread into your gut. You outstretched your arm and blocked the sight with your good hand. “Mercy. Mercy,” you said. “Put it away before I barf.”

“So how'd it end up in Pre’s hands?” he asked, deactivating the saber and looking at the details on the hilt a little closer.

You scowled a question at him in the newly-settled silence. “How does anything get passed down in a family?” you said, like this was the dumbest question you’d ever heard. “Someone dies, someone else gets their stuff. How’d it end up in _your_ hands; that’s the real question. How did you come to be smuggling a thousand-year-old nightmare in your pants, sir?”

“Moff Gideon, the one who stole Grogu,” he began. “He had it. We fought. I won. Apparently that makes it _my_ creepy magic blade now. _My_ problem. I tried to give it to Bo-Katan, but she said it had to be won in combat, and you said it followed your family line. So Pre must’ve won it from a family member, right? Some rite of passage or something?”

“Are you asking if my ancestors fought and killed their fathers for control of the Darksaber?” you asked with a scoff that turned into a laugh. “That’s some old-school Mandalorian shit right there. No. No, the Darksaber was in my family for a thousand years. Bo-Katan can say it ‘has to be won in combat’ if she wants to, but that's a pretty new hangup, it’s not really a longstanding tradition. After Tarre died, it ended up with the Jedi and then was stolen back. But in the eons since, it was just...handed down. It’s only been ‘won in combat’ since Pre died. So, like, _twice_. Or I guess three times, depending on how your friend Gideon ended up with it. Well, four, counting you.”

He held it out to you. “Want it back?” he asked, taking a step closer. “If it’s some kind of heirloom…”

“ _Fuck_. _No_.” You held up a palm to keep it at bay, then scooted back up against the headboard, as far away as you could get from the cursed thing. The bacta sloshed in your lap, nearly spilling all over you.

A mischievous smile crinkled the Mandalorian’s eyes and you hurled a pillow at him in admonishment. He engaged the saber and sliced a sharp stroke upward, buzzing the pillow clean in half and sending a blizzard of singed feathers fluttering around the room.

“They’re gonna charge you for that,” you said, smiling in the sudden snowstorm. “That was like a hundred-credit little stunt you just pulled.”

He winked at you and plucked a feather from the air, then took a couple steps forward and offered it to you, holding the deactivated saber behind his back. As you twirled the feather between your fingers, you paused to wonder how many times the Mandalorian had winked before. Like… was that the first one since he’d put his armor on all those years ago? Or was he constantly making faces under that helmet and no one knew but him?

“It’s strange to think about you wielding a weapon my ancestor made with his own hands,” you said, coming back to the moment in front of you. “The weapon my grandfather terrorized entire _worlds_ with. The weapon that killed him. A weapon that—” A huff of disbelief rushed out of you and you shook your head. “The kyber crystal that powers the Darksaber… I’ve worn a shard of it around my neck since I was a kid.” You showed him your pendant, then turned it over to reveal the shriek-hawk engraved on the reverse. “The symbol of Clan Vizsla. And, unfortunately, Death Watch.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed to take the pendant up in his hand; he peered at both sides of it, brushing his thumb across the facets of the crystal, like he’d done the night before you left.

“And now the rest of this crystal—and the weapon it powers—is in your hands,” you said. It seemed fitting somehow, but you dared not say that out loud. You cleared your throat and shifted topics before you could tell too much truth. “So you’ve gotta, what, fight this chick for custody of the Darksaber-slash-Mandalore?”

“Why, are you jealous that someone else might get to fight me?” His tone was nothing but playful, but you found yourself feeling defensive.

“I am _not_ jealous of Bo-Katan Kryze,” you scowled. You sipped your water loudly and then muttered into your cup, “Jealous of a fuckin’ fifty-some-year-old terrorist.”

The Mandalorian laughed. More than just a single short laugh, he bowed his head and fully _chuckled_ at you. Low and rumbling, it made you want to smile even though it was definitely at your expense this time.

“What is so amazingly funny?” you asked, enunciating every word, straining to keep a straight face.

He rubbed a hand along his jaw and scratched at his stubble. “It’s just nice to see you burn again a little bit, _trac’ika_ ,” he said. He took up your good hand and kissed the base of your thumb. “Don’t worry, you’re the only one I want to fight.”

You narrowed your eyes at him to avoid openly beaming but failed, shaking your head as a grin carved your face in two.

“How do you know all this, anyway?” he asked you, bumping his knee against your thigh to get your attention.

“Which part? My _ancestral legacy_ , or the story of the woman who incited my grandfather to all but use my mother as a slave for him and his goons?” you asked. He drew his brows together in question, but you needed little encouragement to continue. “It was Bo-Katan’s idea to bring my mother to Carlac; Mom was like fifteen at the time, horrified by the shit she found out her father was doing, and Bo was like, ‘If she thinks you’re a monster, she’s not gonna join us, but you may as well keep her close and teach her not to cross you.’ And so the Death Watch used her as a serving girl and treated her like garbage. I guess Mom felt like she had a good reason to keep tabs on Lady Bo. Couple of ‘em, when you get right down to it.”

You picked at a loose thread on the sleeve of your tunic, then looked back up at the Mandalorian.

“That was how she ended up among the Ming-Po,” you said. “A bunch of women from the village had been abducted by Pre’s flunkeys and forced into servitude, and the chief demanded them back. Pre and the rest of the Watch left with the girls and my mother snuck after them, figuring maybe the Ming-Po would agree to hide her since now they knew what a dick her father was. She saw Pre and Bo-Katan and the rest of Death Watch pretend to come in peace and then set fire to the buildings. It’s all in Mom’s journals,” you said, nodding to the duffel on the floor. “There were other parts I researched on my own. Had a lot of time with the Holonet on the Crest and then on Carlac.”

“It’s weird that Bo-Katan was friendly with that Jedi, then,” the Mandalorian said. “Ahsoka wanted to make sure to free the prisoners outsi—”

“I’m sorry, _who_?!” you yelled. “Ahsoka _Tano_?” He nodded, his face asking a question he didn’t need to speak because _fuck yeah,_ you knew who Ahsoka Tano was. “You _met_ Ahsoka Tano? Bo-Katan Kryze is friendly with _Ahsoka Tano_?” Now _you_ stood to pace and began to mutter to yourself, “What kind of topsy-turvy bullshit-ass—”

“How do _you_ know Ahsoka Tano?” he asked. “From what she told me, she’s been laying low for quite a while.”

“Ahsoka Tano is my fucking _hero_ ,” you said, flopping down on the bed. “She was used as a servant along with my mother and the group of the Ming Po women. When the Watch attacked the village, she refused to stand idly by; she fought back and killed a bunch of them. She saved a lot of lives that day. It took _four Death Watch commandos_ to tie her down. They dragged her from the village behind a speeder. _Dragged her_. And then when they got back to the Death Watch camp, she killed like ten more of the bastards and bounced. That’s who’s training the kid?”

He shook his head and you deflated, your fantasies of co-parenting with _Ahsoka Motherfucking Tano_ fizzing out before they’d even gotten a chance to be fleshed out.

“Not to be all starstruck, but damn,” you said. “I thought she was more or less just a legend, an exaggerated story my mom told me for, like, _girl power_ or whatever. Every year, the girls would put our hair in three braids and weave blue ribbons around them and paint our faces and do these elaborate staff-fighting routines with green swords, to imitate her lightsabers.”

“Her laser swords are white,” the Mandalorian corrected you.

“How dare you,” you said, your jaw falling open at the sheer _gall_ of him to try and tell you about Ahsoka’s legendary lightsabers.

“She almost took my head off with them, _trac’ika_ ,” he laughed. “The damn things are white.”

“Well maybe she’s beaten so much ass with them that the green’s worn off, I don’t know,” you said, swatting at him for laughing at you. “Maker, I wish she’d almost kill _me_. I can’t believe you led with the Bo-Katan part of the story, you wasted so much of my time.”

“I’ll save the details for when you’re healed up,” the Mandalorian said with a shake of his head. “Your body isn’t ready for this kind of excitement, you gotta be able to travel tomorrow.”

* * *

“By the light of the brighter sun, that _cannot_ be who I think it is,” a familiar voice called out across the hangar in Mos Eisley. Your heart swelled, feeling like it might pop at the sight of her, shimmering like a mirage in the blinding daylight.

“Must be a trick of the suns on the sand,” you replied, beaming.

“Kids,” the woman with a round pile of curly hair admonished, coming into focus as you walked toward her. “Raise ‘em the best you can, teach ‘em everything you know, and one day they decide the whole desert planet in’t big enough for the two of you anymore, no, so they gotta run off and find their own desert planet halfway ‘cross the galaxy. Then they never call, they never write...”

“Peli here looked after me for a handful of years,” you said aside to the Mandalorian. “‘Fore I struck out on my own.”

“I thought you—“ he began, but Peli entered earshot and arm’s reach, so she interrupted. 

“Gave you that whole ‘Sad and alone since I was a young one’ line, did she?” Peli asked, shaking her head but reaching out to hug you fiercely. You couldn’t remember her _ever_ hugging you, but absence makes the heart grow fonder, you reckoned. “Oh, but seeing you again makes me happier than a womp rat with two tails.”

“You have no idea how long it took me to get those colorful turns of phrase out of my vocabulary,” you said, surprising yourself by returning her embrace with equal ardor. You swallowed a sob and clenched your teeth to stop your chin from wobbling, every inch of your skin humming with emotion and relief from the physical contact and the sight of a familiar face. There would be time to break down later; you didn’t want to alarm Peli.

“Right,” the Mandalorian said, deadpan. “You got them out. No color in your speech.”

You scowled at him, then turned to her to make their introduction. “Peli, this is my fr—“ you started. 

“We’ve met,” she and he said at once. 

“I— you—“ you dribbled ineffectually in response. 

“And where’s the other one? The little green guy?” Peli craned her neck and looked around the two of you for the child you still couldn’t quite think of as Grogu.

“Oh boy,” you muttered, turning her toward her house. “Let me make you some caf.”

* * *

“Well, that just ties my dune worm right in a knot,” Peli scowled. She pushed her mug of caf across the table in disgust. “ ** _I told you_** _I’d take him!_ How many times did I say?” She jabbed a finger at the Mandalorian. “And what did you do? Give him away to the first magic… _weirdo_ you stumble into behind enemy lines. Unbelievable.” She rose to her feet, shaking her head and stalked out the door to go work out her frustration on some poor bastard’s ship in the hangar.

“She’ll be alright,” you said, though it saddened you to see her even fleetingly upset. “Peli seems tough as razor moss but deep down, she’s softer than a month-old desert plum; she worries.” Watching her reaction brought you some uncomfortably vivid ideas of what the days following your leaving might have been like for your caretaker all those years ago. Guilt pressed its fist into your gut. “And call me self-centered, but I don’t think this tizzy is all about ‘the little green guy.’”

“You said she ‘looked after you,’” the Mandalorian asked without asking. With the two of you alone, he removed his helmet and sat it on the table with barely a sound, then topped off your caf and poured his own.

“It was Peli’s ship I stowed away on when I left Carlac,” you said, trying not to let your eyes linger too long on his face, lest you make him uncomfortable. “A curly-haired broad with a no-bullshit attitude and a ship staffed by droids—sound familiar?" You crooked your head in her direction and smiled watching her through the small dirty window as she corralled her pit droids and set them to work. "She was on a supply run, basically, stocking up on bits and bolts. We made those runs a few times a year for a little while, but then the Empire took an interest in Tatooine and... no more trips.”

You rose from the table to pillage from Peli’s cookie stash in the kitchen, delighted to find their hiding spot unchanged. “Things were tight to begin with, and they got even tighter without the salvage—she never said anything, but I could tell,” you said. You gestured a broad circle about the room and continued, “Look around; it’s not like she had the money to pay my way and I knew it. So I picked up a couple _talents_ so I could contribute. It wasn’t cozy or anything, and I got, just, _perilously, pants-shittingly close_ to ending up on the wrong side of the Hutts once or twice, but we got by for a while.”

He stayed silent, as was his way, but it struck you again that it was all so different without the helmet obscuring his face. This whole time, you’d thought he just stared straight ahead at you, eyes on yours, but that wasn’t the case at all. His eyes danced over yours as you spoke, drifted down to watch your lips, then darted down to your hands when you gestured and back up to watch your face. You saw his eyes lift at the corners when warmth crept into your voice, and his brows knit together a fraction when you mentioned the Hutts. His every emotion was telegraphed across his face clear as day—he’d never learned to conceal them. You made a mental note to warn him later to never play cards without his helmet.

“Eventually… I don’t know,” you said, bringing yourself back to the conversation to cross the room and sit back down. “I stand out, with my weird habits and my covered hair and the way I talk. Plus, she’s obviously not my mother, and people here knew Peli Motto didn’t have a kid until suddenly she did. I raised an eyebrow one too many times for my own comfort and then… took off when I was like 14. I always told myself that she was just some lady who took pity on the poor orphan and let me crash with her; that she was relieved and probably even happy to have me gone. But the older I get, the more I realize...”

You trailed off, taking a few sips of your drink to stop the tears in your eyes from falling. “I’m not proud of just leaving a note and skipping out on her, Din, I’m not. I did wrong and I’m gonna have to make it right. But in the end I _am_ glad I did it, ‘cause a Moff came to town not long after and...” You shook your head. “I didn’t have words for it then, but I knew I was different and that it was dangerous, and that was enough. She would have tried to convince me to stay and I would have let her and we’d both be dead or worse by now.”

You felt your headscarf begin to slip, so you took it off then regarded the bundle of deep blue fabric in your hand before setting it on the table. If he could sit here without his headcovering, so could you. Running your fingers through your uneven, choppy-ended hair, you felt both exposed and seen, two sides of the same coin. It occurred to you that you and the Mandalorian were both without your veils now.

“You never said,” he began, then cleared his throat. “I mean…you said you cover your hair because you promised your mother. But why did she ask you to promise that? I get that it’s an uncommon color, but—”

“Not ‘uncommon,’” you said, feeling a sudden wave of self-consciousness and guilt at uncovering it. “It—nevermind, that part’s not a big deal. The whole thing comes back to some bugshit Mandalorian prophecy.” You snapped off a piece of cookie and breathed in the bright, gingery scent, letting it anchor you in the present.

“You’re messing with me,” he said, setting his cup down on the table and leaning back. “Mandalorians don’t _do_ prophecy. We control our own destiny.”

“Didn’t say _I_ believed it,” you said, shaking your head and splaying your hands. "There was a story about a child of Mandalore who would be born wearing a crown of beskar. They would be descended from great warriors, as all Mandalorians are, but their greatest warrior ancestors would have taken two very different paths.” The notion embarrassed you, though you couldn’t say why, so you looked down at your cup of caf and turned it in your hands.

“My mother was sure the, like, _Prophesied Child_ was me,” you continued, rolling your eyes and waggling your fingers in a goofy, magic-spell way. “People like Bo-Katan don’t really want competition for their rule, and might’ve preferred to, uh, ‘ _just in case_ ’ me out of the way when I was little and not a threat. So she kept me hidden, made me promise to cover my crown, so to speak. 

“The child was destined to follow the path of one of their ancestors, but the story didn't say which,” you continued, refilling his caf and your own just for something to do with your hands. “My mom took that to mean that the child would get to choose. Following whichever path, they would restore Mandalore to its ‘former glory.’”

“Which Mandalore was the ‘glorious’ one?” he asked, both hands cradling his cup. “The people who worshipped war or the ones who worshipped peace?”

You shrugged. “Both led to their downfall,” you said, folding your legs up into the chair, making yourself smaller. “Pre wanted war, conquest, _power_. Satine clung to peace so strongly it became a war of its own, and when the battle started from within, they could barely fight back.”

You recounted your armor dream to him, glossing over the parts you told him before you left for Carlac and focusing instead on the parts of the vision that had changed when you were on the prison ship. You told him about how Pre’s armor had first tried to seduce you with power and then tried to seize you when that failed; then told him about how Tarre’s armor had promised balance, and that was the path you’d thrown yourself to.

“Maybe that’s why the Darksaber found me,” the Mandalorian said after a moment’s thought. “To find its way to your hand, your line. To find its way back to the rest of itself.” He nodded at your pendant.

The saber’s ominous, discordant song hummed softly in the quiet room and seemed to reverberate off the beskar on your necklace. You suppressed a shudder.

* * *

Not long after, the Mandalorian took his leave, setting out to visit a friend in Mos Pelgo before returning to the room the two of you had rented in town. After seeing Peli’s reaction to the news about Grogu earlier, you decided to stay behind and devote some time to mending fences.

You rewrapped your hair and then stepped out of the house to find her tearing ass around the hangar, irritation plain in her every movement. She barked orders at the droids, carrying a spanner the size of her arm; she alternated between gesticulating wildly with it and wielding it like a weapon.

“Man’s got a lot of nerve, I’ll tell you,” she grumbled as he zipped out of sight on the speeder. “Watch that he doesn’t hand you off to the first person to ask nice.” She was being unfair, but she already knew that; there was no point in calling it out.

“I’m a pain in the ass; they’d bring me right back,” you said, smiling. She turned away and didn’t reply, focusing her attention on her client’s ship. After a few beats of silence, you confessed, “I really loved that little womp rat.”

“Don’t use the past tense,” she said, grunting to twist a rusted bolt. “Doesn’t go away just ‘cause he’s not here. If it did, it wasn’t love to begin with.”

The weight of her words settled in your stomach like a stone. She was right, of course. You still felt all that love, it hadn’t gone anywhere, but now it lived alongside powerlessness and worry. It was easier to think about your role in the Child’s life as something over, something done, rather than think of the uncertainties of the future and whether you’d ever see the foundling again.

Shame flared in your cheeks as you realized how much worse you’d feel if you’d spent five years with the Child, like Peli had with you.

“Trouble with the hyperdrive?” you asked, craning your neck to see what she was working on. Both of you were better at talking with your hands full. “Tighten up the ignition line yet?”

“Be my guest,” she said.

You rifled in the pile of tools at her feet and took up a wrench, then set about your task. It had been years since you’d done any real work on a ship outside of basic tinkering on the Razor Crest, but you were surprised at how quickly the muscle memory took over. For several minutes, you worked side by side in silence.

“I came back twice, you know,” you said softly.

“Mm-hmm,” she hummed, tucking a freed bolt into the pouch at her hip.

“I did,” you said, stopping what you were doing to look at her.

“I know,” she answered, keeping her eyes on her work. “Trinto Duaba saw you both times.”

Ugh, curse that skull-faced fucker. Of course he did.

“I just chickened out,” you said, giving your attention back to the ignition line. “I was afraid you’d be mad at me, afraid I’d stay and someone would get hurt.”

“No,” she sighed. “You weren’t afraid. You were ashamed.”

You opened your mouth to argue, but you couldn’t find the right words. There weren’t any.

“You’re right,” you said. Again, she didn’t respond and you found yourself frustrated, not knowing what to say. “You got me at sixes and sevens here, Peli, I don’t know what you want me to do. It was ten years ago; I can’t take it back.”

“Oh, you take that bellyaching out into the Dune Sea and toss it overboard, youngling,” she said, tossing her wrench down into the sand and then pointing a finger at you. “You were a _daughter_ to me, and you left without a word, what do you _think_ I want you to do?”

“I never belonged here, Peli!” you said, your heart pounding in your chest. “I grew up with people calling me Outsider on Carlac, and then I come here and I’m the outsider all over again, _I’m_ the freak. In _Mos Eisley!_ ”

“You think I never got called Outsider?” she fired back. “Kid, look at me. Listen to this voice. I’ve been an outsider plenty, I could’ve—”

“People _love you_ , Peli! Are you kidding me?” you interrupted. You gestured a broad circle and went on, “Look around, you’ve got thirty-seven different sabaac partners, and no one in this whole town doesn’t know who you are.”

“You gotta _let_ people love you, Heat Sink!” she said, using your old nickname for the first time. She softened her voice and turned back to the hyperdrive, loosening a bolt by hand and putting it with the others. “People won’t fight you for the privilege. Not for long. You have to _let them love you_.”

“That’s never been a skill of mine,” you said, bending to pick up her tool off the sand. “I’m more the ‘assume apathy despite all proof to the contrary until you’ve convinced them that caring about you is futile’ type.”

“Yeah, no shit, kid,” she muttered, taking the wrench from you. With a few final turns, she dislodged the last bolt and heaved the hyperdrive’s housing onto the cart at her side. “You’re more the type to swing your feet out of bed in the morning just to pick a fight with the floor for holding you up.” You lowered your gaze to your feet.

“’Never belonged here,’” she grumbled, repeating your words. She spat on the ground. “ _You belonged with me_.”

You fell apart then, so sudden that it caught you completely off-guard. Huge, wracking sobs burst out of you like a dam-break, contorting your face and taking your breath away. Peli dropped her wrench on the ground again and enveloped you in her arms, shushing you. “I’m sorry,” you wailed into her shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Peli. I shouldn’t’ve—" Another convulsive bawl took you over and stole your words from you.

“I thought I wanted to hear that,” she sighed, her voice thick with emotion. She shook her head and splattered a tear onto your shoulder. “Ten years, I played it out in my mind. Scripted it every which way. But I’d give anything to take that feeling away from you now.”

“I’m sorry,” you repeated like a prayer. “I’m so sorry. It wasn’t you, I just—” you sniffled “—I just thought you’d be fine without me. Better off. Life would be easier.”

“You _thought I’d be fine_ without you?” she said, pulling back from the embrace to take your face in her hands. “And you’re trying to tell me _it wasn’t me_ that led to you leaving, when I obviously didn’t love you near as loudly as I should have?” If she kept quoting your words back to you, you were going to die of the shame.

“You weren’t obligated to love me at all, Peli, I was just a stowaw—”

“Don’t you dare,” she seethed, looking like you’d just slapped her. “Don’t you _dare_ finish that sentence. Don’t you _dare_ cheapen five years of family and ten years of fear by calling it an obligation. It is _love_. For me, it is _love_. You can take it or leave it, but you will call it by its true name.”

“I don’t think I know _how_ to take it,” you whispered. “But I’ll try.”

You stopped and started your next sentence several times before you could coax it out.

“I love you, too, Peli,” you finally said, putting your arms around her again. “It’s love for me, too.”

* * *

The next morning, you woke with an emotional hangover and a brutal headache, consumed by a single desire. You padded across the dim spaces of Peli’s guest room and living area mostly by memory, stumbling toward the kitchen with a single-minded goal of obtaining and ingesting caffeine.

"I have something for you," a low voice murmured from within arm's reach. Startled, you shouted and spun on the spot, palm striking out at roughly humanoid chest level to push the intruder away with your connection to the Force.

The figure flew back several feet, knocking over a chair before landing sprawled on the floor with a grunt, head resting at an awkward angle against the leg of the table. You squinted in the dark, watching for movement and readied yourself for their counterattack. Tiptoeing forward, you scanned the shadows for something you could use to defend yourself. Your fingers were grasping for the neck of a lamp when the voice spoke again.

"I _have_ missed your violent response to gifts," it said, strained, electronic, and enragingly familiar. 

Din.

Your hands flew to your mouth and you rushed across the room to crouch at his side. You pulled his iron head against you by reflex, a placating " _Oh shit, did I hurt you?_ " gesture any roughhousing kid knows all too well.

"WHY DO YOU KEEP DOING THAT?!" you shouted, knees to the floor, straining to look him over in the predawn dark. You pressed your hands to his chest where you’d focused your push, and he grunted again. "Learn a _lesson_! Maker's sake! Are you okay?"

A short, breathy chuckle wrapped around you. The Mandalorian grabbed your forearms lightly and stood, hauling you to your feet alongside him.

"You'll be the death of me, _trac'ika_ ," he said with a smile in his voice. He pulled you into a brief embrace with one hand on the back of your head and the other arm wrapped around your shoulders. He curled his fingers into your mussed hair and it sent tingles over your whole body.

You were caught too off-guard by it all to react, and before you could disengage your previous fight-or-flight and choose a reaction, he'd released you. Your heart wobbled and you were thankful to the dark for concealing the flare in your cheeks that was equal parts adrenaline, emotion, and indignance.

" _I'll_ be--? You!" you sputtered, letting the latter of the three take the wheel. Your eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness, so you were able to swat at his unarmored upper arm with decent accuracy. "You scared the _shit_ out of me. What are you doing here! I thought you were spending the night at the inn."

"Not much for sleeping," he said. "I was keeping an eye on things out there." He gestured with his head toward the door. "When Peli woke up and got to work, she sent me inside. Said I was scaring the droids."

"So you came in here to lurk in the dark like a fucking nightshrike?" You swatted at the wall until you found the switchplate. The lights flared on and you flinched from the brightness.

"I see just fine in the dark," he said, tapping his helmet. He bent to the floor and grabbed the chair that had been knocked over in the scuffle.

"The hell's goin' on in here?" Peli demanded in her gruff but unaggressive way, bursting in the door as he was righting the chair. "Sounds like I got a frickin' shockboxing cage match happenin' in my front room."

When she'd confirmed that everything and everyone was okay, she seemed satisfied. She pointed a finger at the Mandalorian. "You. I sent you in here so you'd quit spookin' my droids, not to rearrange the furniture."

Quick as she entered, she turned to leave, but spun back around, pointed at him again and added, "And no 'rearrangin'' my former ward, either. _No funny business,_ I mean it. You’re already on my list.”

"Peli!" you gasped, but she was already gone, muttering about how he oughta know that her droids knew plenty of places to dump a body. The door closed behind her with a thud and you stood there breathless in the silence for what felt like a full minute despite only being a couple heartbeats.

"What the fuck, Pel," you whispered, then a wheezing laugh rushed out of you and you covered your face with both hands. Never one to miss out, she'd managed to come from ten years behind to cram an entire adolescence's worth of surrogate-parental embarrassment into one thirty-second encounter.

She was a miracle.

You turned to the Mandalorian, splayed your hands helplessly, and said, "Caf?" He shook his head and tapped his helmet. With Peli coming and going, you weren’t surprised he wanted to keep it on, but you missed seeing his face.

“Suit yourself,” you said, “but if I don’t get some in my system I might actually die.”

Your bare feet beat a silent path to the small kitchen, and you set about putting on a pot to brew. You scraped a few spoonfuls of grounds into the carafe, then filled it with water from the cycler and put it over the fire. Next, you turned your attention to making toast, slicing off a thick wedge of bread and propping it up next to the burner under the caf pot.

While you waited, you finger-combed the tangles from your bed-headed hair, then pulled it back and went through all the muscle memory of tying it in a knot, but it was too short now—even more so since Peli had helped you even out the crooked ends last night—so it just cascaded back around your shoulders. Peli was the only living person who had ever regularly seen you with your hair uncovered and even though you'd chosen to let your hair be seen by Din a couple times now, you felt uneasy and exposed, especially standing there in just your tunic. The carafe began to bubble and you flipped over a timer, then turned over your bread. You looked from the stovetop to the Mandalorian and found him looking at you.

"It's still weird, I know; seeing me with my hair, like, _out_ ," you said, cheeks flaring as you turned to grab jam from the cabinet. "Sometimes it even takes _me_ by surprise. ‘Specially short like this."

"Not weird," he said. "Just different. I’m getting used to it. It... suits you."

A million different reasons to dismiss or demurr came to mind, but instead you smoothed the top of your hair and twirled a lock between your fingers and looked at it. "Thank you. I've spent a long time thinking it was more burden than blessing, but...I kinda like it. Before I hacked it to bits, I mean.”

While you were distracted, your toast went from Warm Bread to Incipient Fire and you moved to pull it from the flame.

“Dank fuckin’ ferrik!” you yelped, bringing your fingertip to your mouth reflexively. When you'd reached for your toast, a flame from the burner sputtered and wrapped itself harmlessly around your finger. But when you had startled from it, your finger touched the blazing-hot carafe. Didn’t help that you’d used your recently-maimed hand, which was still more than a little clumsy.

"You okay?" he asked, grabbing your wrist to appraise your hand. It was fine, just a little burn, but it hurt like a bastard.

"Move," he said gently, stepping into your space and guiding you away with his shoulder. You backed up a couple steps and hopped up to sit on the counter. Peli always hated when you did that, you remembered, and you thought for a second about sliding back to the floor as you tucked your tunic tightly around your thighs.

The Mandalorian filled a glass with cold water from the cycler and placed it on the counter next to you, then guided your hand to it, placing your burned finger in the cool liquid. The pain melted away to almost nothing in the time it took him to turn back to the counter to rescue your smoldering breakfast.

You smiled at the gesture and thanked him.

"What I was saying earlier--" he said with his back to you, scraping off the scorched parts of your bread with a knife, then sweeping the blackened crumbs into the sink.

"Before you scared the shit out of me," you prompted him, swaying your dangling feet.

"Before you tried knocking my head off," he corrected. "Is that I have something for you outside." He turned to face you and held out a piece of golden toast smeared with jam. You took it with your good hand and bit a corner, raising your brows in an unvoiced question.

The timer emptied and he clicked off the burner under the caf. The Mandalorian rested against the counter, his hip a hand's-breadth from your bare knee, and crossed his arms across his chest. "I had some time to kill, and Peli's got some decent equipment out there, so--"

"Oh, Maker's tits, please tell me you didn't touch her tools," you said, aborting a bite in alarm.

He waved you off. "I asked first. She set out four items I was allowed to use for the job," he said.

You tore off a mouthful of toast and made a face that said _“It's your funeral, bub."_ Peli was very particular about many odd things, and her tools were about a thousand of them. Her meat, her caf, and her sabaac house rules were a few other strange additions, but she was most particular about her equipment. Made sense; after all, they were her whole livelihood.

"Who's burning toast?" Peli asked, barely through the door. One of her little red droids had been following her and ground to a halt just outside the threshold. Peli loved her pit droids and kept them in tip-top shape, but they weren't allowed in the house because they were always covered in grease and muck.

"Nobody" you said, then took a big bite of bread in full view as she approached and spoke around the mouthful. "You're having a stroke."

"You wish, kid," she said. When she got within arm's reach she moved to swat you off the counter, but noticed your hand in the glass. "What'd you _do_ to yourself, Heat Sink? Can't leave you alone for a second, even now you're grown."

"Burned my finger," you said, showing it to her.

"'Heat Sink?'" the Mandalorian asked. You groaned and put your hand back in the water.

"Yeah, 'cause she's so cool and calm and level-headed," Peli said with more than a subtle trace of irony. "Takes all the heat right out of any situation and never gets her blood up, no matter what, don’t you find? "

"Everyone's a kriffing comedian," you said, shaking your head but smiling. You withdrew your hand from the glass and flicked the water at Peli affectionately, slid off the counter, and poured a cup of caf. In the next room, you grabbed your trousers and scarf from where they lay in a heap on the floor, dressed with the toast held between your teeth, then returned back through the kitchen and made for the door. "Caf's fresh, Chuckles. If you'll excuse me, I was promised a gift."

"That better not be code!" Peli called as you walked through the doorway, the Mandalorian in tow.

"Think I should tell her you call me _trac'ika_?" you asked with a grin once you were outside. "Bet that'd get her going."

"Probably better not to mention it," he said. You were waiting for him to make fun of you, and you didn't have to wait long. "So... _Two_ nicknames about your temper."

"Your nickname for me is about my _temper_?" you asked, all mock outrage. "I thought you were just saying I was hot."

Your heart revved the second you said it. Loaded banter was a language you spoke fluently, but it made you weirdly nervous of late.

"Hot- _headed_ ," he volleyed back, and you suppressed a frown.

The Mandalorian guided you to one of Peli's many cluttered workbenches—this one covered with a tarp—and then grabbed your upper arm to spin you toward him and took the caf from your hands. "Before I show you, I want to make sure you know... This was supposed to be helpful. It's not that I thought you couldn't-"

"Yeah, yeah, good intentions are duly noted, blah blah, show me." You clapped your hands eagerly. You'd been trying to figure out what present he could have gotten you that would require use of Peli's sacred gear but hadn’t really come up with much.

He turned to the workspace, grabbed a handful of the tarp's middle, and lifted it from the table.

"Holy shit!" you said with feeling, your arms already reaching for the 'gift' he'd revealed.

Your mother's beskar; he'd completely revitalized it. Every spot of rust was gone and each of the plates had been buffed and oiled to a high shine. The creaky misfit straps had all been replaced with buttery, gleaming leather, and the pinpoint lights visible beneath the edges told you he'd even revived the electronics. Her helmet looked impossibly new, and somehow, the pink tree blossom was in perfect shape.

You picked up a bracer and turned it over reverently in your hands, fingers skimming over the edges and details.

A lilting, triumphant melody danced off of the armor, so bittersweet and sincere that a full-on sob escaped you before you could control yourself.

"Shit," he muttered, reaching out for you. "I'm sorry, I know how personal--"

"Hush, dummy," you said after blowing a ragged breath through pursed lips. You curled your empty hand against his neck, pushing your fingertips underneath the edge of his helmet to make contact with his skin, then squeezed your eyes shut and focused on the beskar's song. You imagined the song running through you like electricity, using you as a conduit and traveling into the Mandalorian. He tensed and took in a sharp breath, then grabbed hold of your elbow. The music continued, dancing through the both of you.

"Right?" you laughed. You moved to drop your hand, but he held your arm in place for a moment longer, until your concentration was spent and the song faded in you.

"What _was_ \--?" he trailed off, words failing him a little. Fair.

" _You_ did that,” you said, retrieving the caf from his hands before he dropped it and desperately wishing you could see his face. You replaced the bracer on the table and lovingly touched the other pieces. "That's its song. I think it’s just…happy again."

"Your _beskar'gam_ is happy?" he said, his speech slow and stilted, as if he were speaking a mouthful of a language he didn't understand. Though you'd talked about hearing beskar's song before, you didn't think he ever really understood what you meant 'til now.

You shrugged and beamed at him. "Can't love something like it's a member of your clan for generations without it coming to life at least a little bit," you said. You looked up into his visor. "Thank you. For taking care of it for me. I've been dying to get it cleaned up like it deserves. You should’ve heard its song before."

"I hoped you wouldn't mind," he said. "It's a pretty personal thing—a religious ritual—to maintain your armor, but I thought with it being in such a state..."

You nodded. "I'm glad for your help. It needed you."

"Now," he said, clapping his gloves together once and rubbing them together. "Ready to put it on?"

* * *

You'd never had a donning ceremony, obviously, and you'd never been to anyone else's. You barely even knew they existed--you could recall Din and your mother referring to theirs once or twice, saying something offhand like "after my donning," but that was the extent of it. So the Mandalorian guided you through it and you spent the day talking and preparing. He stood before you armored but barefaced, his helmet resting next to yours on the sand. It was nearing dusk, and the two of you had borrowed Peli's speeder to travel out of the confines of Mos Eisley and into the empty desert where you wouldn't be witnessed or interrupted. 

The Mandalorian had gifted you a _kute_ , the base layer that would go under your armor. It was fitted but loose enough to move in, made of thin armorweave dyed a blue so dark it was almost black. 

“You look like the night sky,” he said, fondness crinkling the corners of his eyes. Lights barely bigger than grains of sand twinkled across the _kute_ at the attachment points for the armor plates, and it gave you a celestial quality. 

_And you look like the suns_ , you thought. His warmth filled your chest and made you lighter on your feet.

He squeezed your upper arms to comfort you, took a step back, and slid his helmet over his face. Seeing him in his full armor made you feel smaller, especially standing in bare feet, basically in what amounted to underwear.

“This moment is the last you will spend vulnerable to your enemies,” he said solemnly in Mando’a, as if he knew how exposed you felt. “You already possess the spirit and fortitude of a warrior. Now, you will don a warrior’s armor and claim your place among your people.”

You caught a whiff of incense and tree blossom, then felt a warm-water wave wash over you. Tears leapt to your eyes and your heart was so full not one more speck of emotion could fit inside it. You briefly debated whether it was your imagination or the true presence of your mother and the Child, but decided it didn’t matter; they were with you regardless.

“When one chooses to walk the Way of the Mandalore, you are both Hunter and Prey,” the Mandalorian continued. “It is not a path for the weak of heart.”

“It is an honor to walk this path,” you said. “I will draw strength from my convictions and my people, adding my might to theirs—another stone stacked atop a mountain, bringing us ever higher.”

He nodded. “This is the Way,” he said.

“This is the Way,” you said for the first time. A tear slipped down your cheek and onto the sand.

The Mandalorian retrieved your boots from your mother’s embroidered bag and placed them before your feet. “The feet of a warrior march ever onward, choosing to walk a path that brings honor upon them, upon their clan, upon the Mandalorian people.”

“I will walk an honorable path,” you said, stepping into the boots that he’d given you—the boots that had saved you. “I will be strong enough to keep to my path in the face of obstacles and adversity.”

“The legs of a warrior are tireless,” he continued. He knelt to the ground and affixed the thighpieces to the attachment points of your _kute_. Your stomach clutched as he tightened the now-redundant leather straps around your legs. “They do not falter.”

 _They might,_ you mused. You chastised yourself lightly and wrenched your focus back to the _sacred fucking ritual!_ at hand. “I…” You swallowed hard, blew out a short breath, and began again, “I will not stray to the easier path. I may regroup, but I will not retreat.”

You spared a thought to hope his helmet’s thermal imaging filter wasn’t engaged.

“The aim of a warrior is true,” he said, applying your vambraces. “They do not choose their targets with recklessness or caprice.” He offered you his hand.

“I will defend myself and my people,” you said, wrapping your grasp around his bracer as he did the same. “I will defend those who cannot defend themselves; I will not bear idle witness to the recklessness or caprice of others.”

He looked at you in silence for a handful of seconds, then retrieved your mother’s functional _shuk’orok_ , applied it gingerly to your injured hand and slipped a glove like his own onto the other. “The hands of a warrior hold fast. They do not let go of that which matters most.”

“I will keep true to the guidance of my ancestors,” you answered. You thought about their imperfections and added, “I will seek first to build, rather than destroy.”

“The shoulders of a warrior bear a heavy burden,” he said, affixing your pauldrons. “They must be strong enough to keep to their path even while encumbered.” 

“I will not allow difficult terrain to tempt me toward complacency or ease,” you replied. “I will be kind enough to offer aid to those that carry too great a load; I will be humble enough to request it when I myself am overburdened.”

He slipped a vest of shock-absorbing padding over your head and cinched it at your waist on both sides. Fire blazed low in your core and you fought a sharp intake of breath as the straps squeezed around you. You locked your gaze straight ahead—more or less at the base of this throat—and grappled your focus away from his proximity and back to the sanctity of the moment.

“The heart of a warrior is not cruel,” he said, raising your chestplate to the front of the vest, not quite touching the padding, but instead letting it hover there. The electromagnetic attachment points on the vest pulled against those in the beskar, drawing you forward an extra inch until the two met and clicked into place. The Mandalorian released his grasp on the chestplate and you felt your center of gravity shift toward him with the armor’s heft. He walked around you and evened the load by adding your backplate. “They must seek to balance their own interests, the interests of their people, and their sense of justice.”

“I will keep the _Resol’nare_ close and let them guide me,” you said. “I will not fall to the temptations of selfishness or conquest. I will give of myself freely to my people.”

He knelt to the sand and rose with your helmet. “The mind of a warrior must take command of all.” He looked down and brushed his thumb over the painted blossom. After a moment’s consideration he lifted his head and went on. “But outside of the battlefield, it must only take command of itself. A warrior must be wise enough to know that the things they hold sacred should not be a burden for others to bear.”

You furrowed your brow. This hadn’t been in the overview he’d given you before you’d begun.

“A helmet is just a helmet,” he said. “Unless it is a vow. It is not my place to require such a vow of you. There is more than one path. There is more than one Way. I will not force you to accept mine. Once you don this helmet, you _are_ Mandalorian. Whether or not you choose to remove your helmet again, you will _remain_ Mandalorian. The only directive I give you is this: uphold the _Resol’nare_ ; keep the promises you’ve made today, to yourself and to your people. By forsaking the _Resol’nare_ , forsaking your word, forsaking your people, you would forsake your own soul. This is how you cease being Mandalorian and become _dar’manda_. Be true, and Mandalorian you will remain.”

Emotion tightened your throat. Pride radiated from the mudhorn at his shoulder, and from every bit of you. You bowed your head, closed your eyes, and let him slip your mother’s helmet over the thin cap that covered your hair. The weight of it rested on your crown and all at once the significance of the moment washed over you. _At last_. At last, you had a people. At last, you had a _home_.

“Lift your gaze, _Mando’ad_ , and see with your true eyes.”

You obeyed. For the first time, you saw the Mandalorian through the active visor of your helmet, saw him as his tribe had seen him. Better—you saw a version of him they hadn’t yet seen; a man kind and sage enough to see the world for all its shades of gray. A man who held to his beliefs but was secure enough in them to allow others their own minds. A man who had risked his entire identity in the name of love, who then and there decided that if his identity required him to abandon someone helpless—someone he loved—then his identity had to be shifted, or it wasn’t worth claiming at all.

“With this step, the next chapter in your journey begins. This moment marks your _cin vhetin,_ ” he said. An electric hum crackled across your fingertips and purred along your skin. “Your past deeds can no longer reach you, your debts are forgiven, and you begin anew. You are pure as a field of new-fallen snow.”

His words buoyed your mother’s voice in your memory: _Your destiny will make you white and pure as snow._ It was the Mando’a phrase in particular— _cin vhetin_ , “a snow-white field”—that made the memory feel heavy with significance.

A million emotions warred their way through you, but only one managed to pick up enough words to find its way out.

“You are just… _magnificent_ ,” you said in earnest, face alight with a grin. You grazed your grasp down his arms and squeezed an emphasis onto the last word, your hands just above his vambraces. The word was true but it made you feel foolish to say, so you huffed a laugh. “I’m so glad it was you who… It’s like you brought me home. Thank you so much.”

His empty hands reached for you and closed around fistfuls of your _kute_ , pulling you close with a force as inevitable as the tide. Warmth thrilled through you in anticipation of the embrace, but his hold on you shifted. His hands reached for your neck and the warmth in you flared to a smolder as the other Mandalorian, so gently and so slowly, as if you might stop him, lowered his forehead to yours. The instant the two pieces of beskar made contact, a song flickered to life entirely unlike the songs you’d heard from either set of armor before.

It caught you by such surprise that you clamped your grip on his arm like a vise to steady yourself. The Mandalorian, probably misreading your reaction, moved to back out of your proximity. You tried to hold him fast, but he’d straightened out of reach.

“No, no, it’s not—" you began, but the rest of your sentence evaded you as the song evanesced with your broken contact. You released him to pull off your gloves then reached for his hand and wiggled your fingers in a beckoning gesture. When he gave it to you, you stripped his glove and pressed your palms together, intertwining your fingers with his. You curled your other hand around his nape and pulled his head back down to once again rest against yours, straining to your tiptoes to bring the two helmets into contact. As before, you imagined yourself as a go-between, transmitting the renewed melody from your core, through your hand and into your companion.

He strengthened his hold on your hand and tilted his head against yours in unspoken question. A second later, he gave quiet voice to it: “It’s different. Fuller. It didn’t sound like this before.”

“Last time, it was _my_ beskar singing,” you said. You knew what he would ask next, and you let him take that path so you could enjoy the answer. So seldom lately had you gotten to use your flair for the dramatic to its best effect. What with all the solitude and kidnapping and _enhanced interrogation_.

“This is _my_ beskar?”

You smiled in the privacy of your own helmet. “No,” you said. You kept your hand on his skin, but took half a step back, breaking contact between the two pieces of armor, then pressed a hand to the flat of his chest. “ _This_ is your beskar.”

You were delighted to notice again that his armor sounded like him. Deep woods and slow, deliberate strings and warm rhythm. When you closed your eyes and gave it your full attention, you heard something beneath it that you couldn’t quite place, an echo of something far away.

“So this—” he rested his head against yours again and the wider melody swelled “—is, what, how it sounds overlapped?” His gloved hand rested lightly at your elbow, steadying you both in your proximity.

“Shh,” you said. Your mental strength was fading and so, too, did the music. When all you could hear was breath—yours, his, and the desert’s—you released him and raised your eyes. “There’s bits in the combination that I hadn’t heard in either song before. Sum must be greater than its parts, I guess.”

Once the words left you, you wanted to suck them back in. It wasn’t that they were untrue, more that they felt too true to say out loud.

“Must be,” he echoed, calming one type of anxiety in you but stoking another.

The pair of you retreated to your own thoughts for a moment, and exhaustion deposited you onto the sand. The emotional and physical toll of the day and all the days that had come before it had piled up too much and your body was sitting down before you realized it.

“I almost forgot,” he said suddenly, a smile in his voice. “I found _uj’alayi_ and _ne’tra gal_ in town. I thought we could celebrate your new birthday Mando style. It’s on the speeder.”

He turned to go and you melted back onto the ground, gravity seeming to double on your weary bones. You lay sprawled on the sand and watched the binary suns set through your visor, consumed by the notion that the sight before you would—by its very nature, it _had to_ —someday end in the utter devastation and decay of one of the bodies you beheld. From the moment they entered one another’s reach, the two stars had been locked in a deadly, inescapable dance; they would take turns stealing one another’s mass breath by breath until one day, one of them took a little too much and the other would vaporize in a massive explosion and then fade out entirely. The survivor would spend the ensuing eons alone, waiting for its own end.

For a long moment, you pondered the cruel inevitability that countless epochs of proximity would end in one star being bled and bled until the only vestiges of it that remained were wisps of its energy intermingled with that of its devourer. That billions of years coupled could end in total solitude.

You heard your name, muffled by distance and the dunes, but sublime as a song from the throat of the one who called it. You turned your head to the sound and watched the Mandalorian striding toward you across the twilit waves with his bounty. You returned your gaze to the heavens as he approached. Wordlessly, he lay next to you on the sand and took your hand in his.

Perhaps the donor star wasn’t being ravaged at all, you thought. Maybe it was a union, rather than an extinction. An eternal joining that granted the lone, melded star a longer, brighter life than either would have been capable of alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried really hard to tie up the major loose ends here. Many of these big things were meant to be revealed piecemeal, rather than a series of revelatory infodumps, but I wanted there to be closure to most of the threads. Like I said when I started, this was originally just kind of intended to meander week to week, so I built in a few big arcs that would drive the story for a while.
> 
> Have a question that didn’t get answered? Want more info on something in particular, or got a scene request? Leave it in a comment and I’ll write it up in narrative form for you.
> 
> PS, yeah I know that's not really how binary stars work, per se. Let me have this.


End file.
